Gold Passport Concierge

Good Afternoon and thanks for pointing this out.

I understand exactly what you mean when it'd be nice to have a blacklist of sorts in place, but due to the nature of third party reservation sites, it may cause more harm than good when a site changes their terms to go from being eligible to ineligible (or vice versa). Human error does happen from time to time, but the BRG agents are supposed to be validating (or invalidating) everything on a case-by-case basis and reading the fine print on every reservation (hence why these calls take a bit longer than normal reservations).

The terms and conditions are transparent enough, but I fear are a bit vague at times. The best example of this are "membership sites". This includes free memberships that require no more personal info than an email account. A lot of the invalid sites we check that are invalidated based on this requirement are the ones that automatically enroll you and create a login with your provided details. To keep good terms between ourselves and the third parties I'm referring to, I won't cite any examples, but a lot of the people reading this thread have probably encountered this on at least one occasion. The third parties that are VERY opaque in their policy (to the point where it's not even in their T&C and you have to find out the hard way - booking a room) have to be periodically checked by management to see if they are still enrolling in a membership without consent. If it does not specify in their terms, the agent will go off of their most recent update from management. The others are supposed to be looked into by the BRG agent.

To sum up the T&C of Hyatt's BRG policy in laymans terms (please don't take it as gospel, but it is a good guideline), the agent is looking for:

Same Hyatt? (Physical address is a dead giveaway, we can't match "4 star hotel in downtown Chicago" that may or may not be our property)

Same room? (King vs Double vs Ocean View, etc.)

Same dates? (Priceline for tonight plus Priceline for tomorrow would be considered two claims; you can't just compare that with Hyatt.com's rate offered for today/tomorrow without splitting it identically on both sites)

Same price? If converted currency, is the rate within 1% to the point where the discrepancy is likely just due to currency conversion? Is there an extra adult fee? Hyatt almost always bakes the extra adult fees into the base rate, whereas some third parties like to tack it on in the taxes & fees section. For properties in tax-inclusive jurisdictions, we will be measuring tax-inclusive rates.

Membership required? See above.

Immediately Bookable? A lot of smaller third parties that can't book directly into our system can operate on a delay - so much so that they take your info, request the booking from us, and if it's still available our system returns a confirmation number. If not, they return to you with either the new availability or the lack thereof. This entire process, if not instant, is not considered immediately bookable. Example verbiage: "You will receive a confirmation within X hours/days".

Of course the BRG T&C is the thorough outline for the program, but this is how I mentally arrange it.

Thank you so much for helping us find these outlier rates. We'd obviously rather have your business directly and there's nothing wrong with you as guests demanding the best possible room rates from our website. Please bear in mind that like all of our T&C, this BRG policy is subject to change. This post may not be relevant eventually, so please trust the agent you're speaking with. We're not out to get you, promise!

Safe travels and happy hunting on those BRGs,

Evan V