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Filling out paper forms and mailing or scanning them is frustrating, but it’s usually required when you’re claiming credit card benefits like price protection and baggage delay protection. Since price protection claims can be time-consuming, some people even utilize services to do it for them.
Citi’s Price Rewind program was already a little more bearable than other banks’ price protection programs thanks to its automated online price tracker. Trouble is, it sometimes fails to find a lower — much less the lowest — price. Hence, I usually still need to search for lower prices myself and submit a claim form to get the best price difference.
The Price Rewind website now allows customers to submit evidence of lower prices online. I had the chance to use the new online claim form for the first time recently when I bought a new FitBit Ionic as a gift. Below, I’ll walk through how to use Citi’s new Price Rewind online claim form when you find a lower price on an item you’ve purchased with an eligible Citi card.
In This Post
Use an Eligible Citi Card for Your Purchase
Price Rewind is offered on most Citi cards. Check your card benefit guide to ensure eligibility as well as learn about exclusions and coverage limits. I used my Citi Prestige for this FitBit purchase, but even the no-annual-fee Citi Double Cash Card — one of our top picks for cash-back cards — offers Price Rewind as a benefit.
Start a Price Rewind Tracker
You should start a Price Rewind tracker within a few days of buying an item on an eligible Citi card. Once the Price Rewind tracker is started, the system will look for lower prices in the 60 days after your purchase.
In this case, none of the search results in the Price Rewind tracker product search were exact name matches to the product I’d bought on the FitBit website. However, three of the results were the product I purchased.
Unfortunately, there’s no way of selecting more than one result to track. So, I chose the search result that also contained the product color. I filled in information about my purchase to start a Price Rewind tracker.
There’s no harm in starting a Price Rewind tracker if you can find the item you purchased in the system. But, don’t worry if you can’t find it; if you find and submit evidence of a lower price, it won’t matter whether or not you started a Price Rewind tracker.
Find a Lower Price
Even if you start a Price Rewind tracker and have the system monitor prices across its limited set of merchants, you should still find and save instances of lower prices during the 60-day period after your purchase.
You can search for lower prices however you wish. I’ve had good luck using Google’s Shopping tab. Google the product name and click the Shopping tab at the top of the results.
Click on the product that matches what you bought, click “Compare prices from…” and then sort by base price. If any of the listings look like a potential match, click on the Shop button to take you to the merchant’s website.
When I searched, eBay had the lowest base price. I’ve never tried using an eBay listing as a lower price example, but it likely wouldn’t work since many items on eBay are sold in auctions. I went with the UmasHome example for $5 more instead.
The lower price example must be for the exact same product you purchased, including the same model number, color and size. The price comparison must be based only on base price — shipping, taxes, warranties and other fees are not included.
When you do find a lower price, be sure that it has all of the required information. Specifically, the benefit request form says the lower price example must show the price, merchant, date when you saw the lower price and the product’s model number and model year.
Submit a Claim Online
Regardless of whether you’ve started a Price Rewind tracker, you can submit an online claim form with the better advertisement. Go to the Citi Price Rewind website, log in using your Citi credentials and select the card that you used for the purchase.
The process for submitting a claim is different depending on whether you’ve started a Price Rewind tracker for the purchase, so we’ll cover each case separately.
If You’ve Already Started a Price Rewind Tracker
If you’ve started a Price Rewind tracker already, you’ll see it listed under “Your recent Price Rewinds” once you’ve logged in.
Click on the item for which you’ve found a lower price. You’ll see a “Lowest tracked price.” If this field is empty or you’ve found a lower price than the one listed, click the “submit your Citi Price Rewind benefit request online” link to enter information about the lower price you’ve found.
You’ll see the item you bought at the top of the form. On this form, you’ll need to enter details about the lower price you found: (1) the lower price, (2) the date of the lower price, (3) the merchant offering the lower price and (4) a screenshot or photo showing the details of the lower price. After entering the details of the lower price, click “Submit Request.”
After you click “Submit Request” you’ll be done with this claim. Make sure you’ve found the lowest price before submitting the request, since you’ll no longer be able to submit additional lower prices nor will the Price Rewind tracker program continue monitoring the price. I submitted my request quickly for the purposes of this article, but we’d recommend waiting until after the 60-day tracking window closes to submit the lowest price you found during the 60-day window.
If You Haven’t Started a Price Rewind Tracker
If you haven’t started a Price Rewind tracker yet, don’t worry. Starting a Price Rewind tracker only saves you from having to enter the name of the product — and of course starts the automated price-monitoring system.
You’ll need to submit a two-step form online; you can find the form here or by clicking on the “How It Works” header and then clicking on the “submit your Citi Price Rewind benefit request online” link in Step One.
The first page of the form asks for information related to the purchase on your Citi card: (1) product name, (2) purchase price (not including taxes, shipping, warranties and other fees), (3) date purchased, (4) where you made the purchase, (5) whether you’d like to receive a check or statement credit for the price difference and (6) a scanned or photographed copy of the itemized receipt. Note that this page checks that the purchase date is within 180 days of the current date, so submit your claim in a timely manner. Click “Add Low Price Information” to move on to the second page of the form.
The second page asks information related to a lower price you’ve found: (1) the lower price, (2) date the lower price was seen, (3) where the lower price was seen and (4) a screenshot or photo of the lower price. Once you’ve filled in all of the information, click “Submit Request” to finalize the process.
Bottom Line
The price protection that comes with many credit cards is an often overlooked benefit. Citi’s Price Rewind is easy to use — and it became even easier to use when the website began accepting claim forms for better prices found by customers within 60 days of a purchase.
Once you submit a lower price, the claim process ends. This means that you can’t submit any better prices you subsequently find, and if you’d started a Price Rewind then the automated price tracker also stops searching. So make sure to maximize your Price Rewind by searching for lower prices for the entire 60-day window after a purchase and then submit the best comparison price you’ve found shortly after the 60-day window closes.
Source: thepointsguy.com