A few days ago I needed to get to St Pancras for an early Eurostar. My train was leaving at a time when I wasn’t especially interested in discovering whether London’s public transport had started behaving reliably yet, so this was always going to be a car journey.
This gave me another opportunity to revisit Blacklane.
I still had $60 remaining from my $100 semiannual Blacklane credit on the Citi Strata Elite. I’ve struggled to get anything close to face value from this benefit before, but this looked like the sort of journey where it might finally have a chance: a fixed departure time, an early start and a car I was going to pay for anyway.
Blacklane wanted £63.87 for Business Class.
Blacklane Business Class pricing for the 5:45am journey to St Pancras
There was no additional Blacklane promotion waiting in my account this time. The $50 voucher from my last experiment was long gone.
At the current exchange rate of $1.361 to the pound, my remaining $60 Citi Blacklane credit is worth £44.09. Applied against the £63.87 fare, I’d be left paying about £19.78. That sounded promising.
Then I checked Uber. For the same 5:45am departure, UberX Reserve was £19.93. Comfort was £23.98, UberXL £28.98 and Exec £34.98.
Uber Reserve pricing for the same 5:45am journey
The comparison was almost absurdly neat. After using my entire remaining $60 Citi Blacklane credit, I’d pay essentially the same amount of cash for Blacklane as I could simply pay for an UberX.
That alone illustrates the problem I keep running into with this credit. Citi may reimburse $60 of the Blacklane fare, but that doesn’t mean I’m receiving $60 of value. The relevant comparison is what I would otherwise spend to make the same journey. And in this case, that was about £20.
Then another card benefit entered the calculation.
Another Credit Complicates Things
I recently received an offer on one of my Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant American Express cards. After enrollment, spending at least $15 on an eligible transit or rideshare purchase earns 1,000 Marriott Bonvoy points, up to three times through September 13.
Targeted Marriott Brilliant offer for 1,000 bonus points on $15+ transit and rideshare purchases
An Uber ride should be an easy opportunity to trigger it. The Brilliant would also earn its ordinary points on the purchase. At £19.93, assuming the same $1.361 exchange rate, the Uber fare is $27.13. At two Marriott points per dollar, that should produce around 54 points from the purchase itself, plus the 1000-point offer.
That gives me 1054 Marriott points. I currently value Marriott points at 0.73 cents each, putting those points at $7.69, or £5.65.
There was one more possibility worth checking. I recently renewed my Delta Gold Amex cards, and the renewed card includes a rideshare credit.
The Delta Gold rideshare credit is limited to U.S. rideshare purchases
Unfortunately, the terms restrict that benefit to rides with eligible U.S. rideshare providers in the United States. So that one stays out of the calculation. Still, this was a useful reminder to enrol for that benefit, now I’m in my second cardmember year.
What Does the $60 Credit Actually Save Me?
The Blacklane ride would generate some rewards of its own. The £63.87 charge is $86.93 at the exchange rate I’m using. At 1.5 Citi ThankYou points per dollar, I’d expect to earn 130 ThankYou points. I value those at 1.5 cents each, or $1.95. That’s currently £1.43. So now I can compare the two choices on the same basis.
Blacklane | UberX Reserve | |
|---|---|---|
Fare | £63.87 | £19.93 |
Citi Blacklane credit | −£44.09 | — |
Cash cost | £19.78 | £19.93 |
Points earned | ~130 Citi TY | ~1,054 Marriott |
Value of points | £1.43 | £5.65 |
Effective cost | £18.35 | £14.28 |
Even after using my entire remaining $60 Citi Blacklane credit, Blacklane leaves me about £4.07 worse off than UberX.
There is an obvious caveat. Blacklane is a more polished product than UberX. The chauffeur is pre-booked, there’s additional waiting time built into the service, and some people will reasonably place real value on that difference.
I don’t place much value on it. For this journey, I need a car to arrive at my home at 5:45am and take me to St Pancras. If UberX does that for less, I’m perfectly happy with UberX. For the way I use ground transportation, that makes the result fairly unfavorable.
This isn’t a case where I was inventing a journey to use a benefit. I needed the ride. It wasn’t a case where public transport is an obviously better alternative. I wanted a car. And it wasn’t a case where I’d chosen an especially expensive Uber against which to make Blacklane look bad. I was comparing two pre-booked rides for exactly the same journey at exactly the same time.
I’ve now given the Blacklane credit several chances. Each time I think I’ve found a situation where the numbers might finally fall into place, I run into the same issue: I simply don’t place much additional value on Blacklane over the rides I would otherwise book. For someone who regularly pays for premium chauffeur services, the calculation could look quite different.
This one seemed particularly promising. I had $60 left, a 5:45am journey I genuinely needed to make, and a Blacklane fare that left me with almost exactly the same cash payment as Uber after the credit. And yet, for my use case, once I account for the rewards available on the alternative, I can use the entire $60 credit and still come out slightly behind.
I like the Citi Strata Elite for plenty of other reasons. I’m just still looking for the journey that makes its Blacklane credit particularly valuable to me.