Transferring Citi ThankYou Points to Leaders Club Points for a stay at the Hotel Kämp, Helsinki




My family has been wanting to visit Finland to try to see the aurora borealis for a while.  The plan is to spend some time in Rovaniemi, a city within the Arctic Circle to try to catch the aurora borealis, and then spend some time in Helsinki to see the city sites.  I've always been curious about the Citi partnership with The Leading Hotels of World since it looks like they have many luxurious hotels in their portfolio.  The Leading Hotels of the World loyalty program is named Leaders Club.  The Hotel Kämp in Helsinki looked like a great opportunity to try to experience this hotel program.



When you transfer Citi ThankYou Points to Leaders Club Points the transfer rate is 1,000 ThankYou Points to 200 Leaders Club points.  The stay at the Hotel Kämp required 13,074 Leaders Club points for a 3 night stay in a Deluxe Twin room.  Since the transfer rate is 1,000 to 200, you can multiply the required Leaders Club points by 5 to get the amount of Citi ThankYou Points you need to transfer.  So, in order to make the reservation I needed to transfer 65,370 (13,074 x 5) Citi ThankYou Points to my Leaders Club account.  Since Citi requires transfers in multiples of 1,000, I had to transfer 66,000 Citi ThankYou Points.  The transfer was instant and I was then able to complete the reservation.



The cash price for this stay was 1,140 EUR (1,000 + 140 taxes) which translates to roughly 1,190 USD at the time of writing.  So the redemption rate for my Citi ThankYou points is around 1.6 cents a point, not too bad, and happy to keep my cash in my pocket and use points to pay for the hotel stay.  According to my research, the payment of the taxes at check-out varies by hotel.  It seems some hotels will make you pay and some hotels won't.  I guess I'll have to wait until our trip to find out what the Hotel Kämp does.  If I don't have to pay the taxes my redemption rate would be about 1.8 cents, which is even better.

Booking with Leaders Club points also entitles us to the following on-property benefits that both Club members and Sterling members enjoy.



These are all great benefits and I can't believe they are all included by just becoming a member of the loyalty program.  For most other major hotel loyalty programs, you would need to be a high level member to start enjoying free breakfast, a potential upgrade, and late check-out benefits.  in closing, I'm really excited to finally get to experience a stay using The Leading Hotels of the World and can't wait to experience both Helsinki and the perks at the Hotel Kämp.

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