Turkish Airlines’ Miles & Smiles loyalty program is offering a 50% bonus to points transferred from Citi to Turkish by June 15, 2024. Now, because Turkish has recently devalued its award chart, this immediately struck me as a great way to get another fantastic Turkish business-class award redemption for a lower number of miles. That may be what you’re thinking, too. But before you start making plans to transfer your Citi points, I’m going to have to quote Lee Corso here and say “Not so fast, my friends.”

The details about how this transfer bonus works make it something that might make sense in some circumstances, but it’s not a no-strings-attached transfer bonus. There are indeed at least two giant strings worth considering.

1. The bonus miles don’t post until after the promotion is over, sometime after June 15. So the extra miles won’t be available to book with if there’s an award seat you want to book right now. You’d have to hope availability opens up after the miles post.
2. There’s a cap on how many bonus miles you can be awarded: up to 50,000 bonus miles. So if you transfer 100,000 miles, you’ll end up with 150,000 miles. But if you transfer 200,000 miles, you’ll end up with 250,000 miles. This might be totally fine if you’re just looking to book something like two business-class award tickets one-way, but if you’re looking at using more miles than that, it makes less mathematical sense because the relative bonus miles awarded decrease the more miles over 100,000 you transfer.

Who could use this:

This bonus is a great opportunity if you’re traveling solo or with one other person (and even better if the other person has their own Citi ThankYou points and Miles & Smiles account!), are looking for business-class award seats, and have flexible days you can travel.

Turkish miles are also a great way to get from the continental US to Hawaii (flying on United, one of Turkish’s Star Alliance partner airlines) for 10,000 miles per person in economy each way. And again, you’d need to be flexible on dates and be willing to wait until mid-June to book.

Related news:

Citi has recently rebranded the Citi Premier card as the Citi Strata Premier card. The important differences are that the Citi Strata Premier now earns 3x at electric-vehicle charging stations and 10x for travel booked through the Citi travel portal. They’ve also improved some of the included insurance coverages. But other than those major points, it’s essentially the same as the Citi Premier. I got great value out of redeeming my Citi ThankYou points in 2023 for two hotel suites for two nights each at an awesome boutique Choice Hotels property in Venice in the peak tourist season, taking advantage of the 1:2 transfer ratio between ThankYou points and Choice Hotels points. ThankYou points also transfer to 14 different airline programs, Accor hotels, and Wyndham hotels.