We have owned this card because, and only because, it provided a 5% rebate on the purchase of BP petrol and a rebate of 0.5% on all other credit. Thus although the annual fee is $89 and and additional card fee $30, the expense of $119 is economic if annual expenditure on fuel is $2380, or somewhat less in proportion to additional ordinary credit used.
Mr Micawber can see that this is a reasonable economic proposition, since rebates received from this source could equal or exceed cost of credit. BP-Citibank Mastercard of course charge merchants a fee and merchants are glad to have our custom, so it was win-win-win.
However one negative is that the chip is unreliable overseas and my attempts at use almost invariably led to rejection, so the risk of reliance substantially exceeded its utility for travel credit.
Citibank is terminating its arrangement with BP on 31 October. They intend to issue a automatic replacement "Classic" card at the same cost but no comparable benefits. So we have no further use for their credit services, and today sought to cancel the account. Citibank have however informed us that we have an open "unresolved dispute", and that our account cannot be closed unless we repay the refund they gave us for the cost of the frustrated ticket on the bankrupt airline.
Our choices in October are therefore either to pay the $119 annual fee that then accrues, (and keep paying it in perpetuity, since the "dispute will never resolve in favour of getting money from the dead airline) or to hand back the refund (which is only marginally more than the annual fee).
To get this particular useless monkey off our back the latter choice seems as if it may be more economic.
So I rescind my previous recommendation of this Bank and its plastic.
Is it worth escalating this issue within Citibank, by writing a letter pointing out the absurdity of their position regarding the "unresolved dispute"? If this doesn't work, a complaint to the Banking Ombudsman comes to mind.
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