This review is for their credit card service.
I travel a lot, both domestically and overseas. One thing Citicards *NEVER* seems to fail to do is put my card on hold every time I make a purchase that's "out of the ordinary" - which means anyplace where I use the card outside of the Northeast US where I live. I've had my card put "on hold" for "suspicious purchases" when I purchased gasoline in California! Needless to say, I've had my card put on hold when making purchases overseas. This also comes into play whenever I purchase items over the internet from a non-US company or purchase airline tickets to a foreign country through Orbitz.
But this doesn't just happen with purchases that are out of the ordinary. I'VE EVEN HAD THEM PUT MY CARD ON HOLD FOR TRYING TO PAY MY LOCAL CABLE BILL WITH IT!!!!!!!!
Each time this happens, I've had to call the Citicards fraud department where they put me on hold forever and try to confirm every single detail of my purchase before releasing my card from hold. To make matters worse, they often drop calls during transfers and sometimes the 1-800 number actually hangs up on me without any answer. Needless to say, doing all of them when I'm overseas may be next to impossible. The trouble is, once they put your card on hold, you've got maybe 48 hours to call them or they automatically revoke your card!
Citicards usually apologizes and says that they'll make a note that I'm a frequent traveler and put alerts on "suppression mode" thus not putting my card on hold as often. However, this is actually complete b.s. since this problem still reoccurs. Finally I got one of the customer reps to admit that the suppression only lasts for a few months, after which you have to call them again to renew!
It's gotten to the point where I anticipate problems with Citicards (e.g., ANY time I make a large purchase, a foreign purchase, and airline ticket purchase, use their card for automatic draft, etc.) and call them beforehand.
In short, this is not a user friendly card and NOT one anyone who is a frequent traveler (domestic or foreign) or a purchaser of large items should use as their serious card. This card is perhaps best only for making small purchases in your own local area. For anything else, use a more serious card like American Express. The only reason I still use Citicards is because of the golden handcuffs of having many rewards points on them (similar to the reason I still fly United Airlines even though their service is awful). If you can avoid using this card, do yourself a favor and use another one. read more