At What Hotels Can You Get the Fourth Night Free with Your Prestige and Other Questions Answered

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I’ve written about the Citi Prestige® Card‘s benefit that gives you the fourth night free on hotel stays that you pay with your card: How to Save More than 25% Off Hotel Stays with Citi Prestige’s Fourth Night Free Benefit. Simply book your stay of 4+ nights through the Prestige’s concierge service, pay with your Prestige, and get the fourth night, including taxes, refunded to you after the stay.

I sometimes forget to mention it among the card’s other amazing benefits:

• 40,000 bonus ThankYou points after spending $4,000 in the first three months
• 3x points on airlines and hotels, 2x on dining out and entertainment
• American Airlines and Priority Pass lounge access
• $250 per calendar year Air Travel Credit to offset airfare, award taxes, and airline fees
• $100 statement credit to offset Global Entry application
• three free rounds of golf per calendar year

Commenter Mike B. took me to task for not mentioning the fourth night free at all in my Comparison Table of Citi Preferred vs. Premier vs. Prestige:

One other benefit of the Prestige card you didn’t mention was the 4th night free on paid hotel stays when using the Prestige card (4th night charge will be reimbursed back to you approximately 30 days after your stay). Must use the Citi Concierge service to book a four night (or longer) stay.

I mostly stay in Airbnb for short and long term stays, so I haven’t used the fourth night benefit myself. But I’ve read up on the benefit to provide an FAQ for the most valuable benefit of the Citi Prestige® Card for some people.

At What Hotels Do You Get the Fourth Night Free Benefit?

To get the benefit, your booking is handled by a company called Carlson Wagonlit Travel. Here is a search box for hotels on Carlson Wagonlit’s website.

It stands to reason that the hotels that show up in the search results there are the ones that Carlson Wagonlit can book for you with the fourth night free via your Prestige. This includes all chain hotels and many independent hotels.

It doesn’t include every hotel in the world, but it is not only expensive hotels. Give the city that interests you a search.

I can’t 100% guarantee all the hotels in the search results on that page are bookable by Carlson Wagonlit when you call to make a fourth-night-free booking, but I believe they are. Let us know in the comments if your experience is different.

How Do You Book a Room with the Fourth Night Free?

Here’s the quickest way to go through the process according to One Mile at a Time, who has used the benefit several times:

• Find the hotel you want to stay at, and the publicly available rate you want. This includes the best available rate, prepaid rate, AAA rate, senior rate, etc. This doesn’t include corporate rates, or promotional package rates, as a general rule of thumb.
• When you know exactly which hotel you want, call up the number on the back of your Citi Prestige Card, and follow the prompts to be connected to a Citi Prestige travel concierge. [Scott: call the direct number for the Citi Prestige Concierge 561-922-0158.]
• Once you have them on the phone, explain you’d like to take advantage of the fourth night free hotel benefit. Furthermore, explain you know exactly the rate and hotel you want, and would like to book right away.
• The agent will take down your basic information (arrival and departure date, preferred rate and room type, etc.). And then they’ll conference in a Carlson Wagonlit Travel travel advisor, who does the actual booking. The Citi Prestige travel concierge will stay on the phone the entire time, as they’ll be the ones to email you your confirmation.
• It’s not the fastest process, but within 15 minutes or so you should be confirmed. If you’re staying at a chain hotel, you can also give them your loyalty program number, so that your stay will immediately show up on your loyalty program’s reservations page.

The 15 minutes it takes to make the booking is frustrating, but if you save $100, $200, or even more by getting the fourth night free, it’s well worth it.

Is the Benefit Capped?

No, theoretically if you lived in hotels on four night stays, you could use the benefit 91 times per year. At the most expensive hotels, that would be over $100,000 in free hotel nights in a year.

Of course, no one uses the benefit like that (I assume.)

But there is no cap on the benefit. Most people will never use it, but if you an use it even a few times a year, the math on keeping the Citi Prestige® Card and paying the $450 annual fee for year two is going to be very easy. In fact, I am keeping the card in year two even without planning to use the fourth-night-free benefit because of the lounge access, Air Travel Credit, and free golf rounds.

Do You Get Elite Benefits and Earn Status on Your Stays?

Yes

When Do You Get Reimbursement?

When you pay the Prestige bill that shows your entire hotel charge (before the fourth night free.)

Do You Actually Have to Pay with Prestige to Get the Reimbursement?

Apparently not, according to an inadvertent experiment by the Frequent Miler.

He had the Prestige, used the concierge to book a hotel, held the hotel with his Prestige, but actually paid the hotel with a different card. Yet when he paid off his Prestige statement on which the hotel charge should have appeared, he got a credit for the hotel’s fourth night and had a negative balance.

I do NOT recommend this. If I use the benefit, I will pay with my Citi Prestige® Card.

Bottom Line

The Citi Prestige® Card‘s most valuable benefit for some people is the fourth night free on paid hotel stays booked through the card’s concierge.

Hotels can be booked over the phone at the lowest available public rate, and then you will be reimbursed for the cost of the fourth night, including taxes after you check out and pay your card’s statement. Not all hotels are included, but most big ones are, and you can check the list on Carlson Wagonlit’s website.

Amazingly, the benefit is uncapped, so you can get hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of value from the benefit if you stay in a lot of hotels.