Originally Posted by mk712

On December 27th I was charged the annual fee on my Ritz card.
On January 1st I made a legitimate seat upgrade purchase.
On January 3rd I called the number on the back of my card to use the airline credit.
On Monday I called the number on the back of my card again, this time to cancel the card.

This is where it gets interesting: after identifying myself the rep asked me how she could help me. I said I wanted to close my account, she paused for about 5 seconds and immediately said "I can close your account, but I see that you've already used the airline credit for this year so I won't be able to refund your annual fee".

Wow, did not expect that. I hadn't even brought up the annual fee or the airline credit, I just said I wanted to close the card. I told the rep I'll keep the card a bit longer and I ended the call.

Considering this is a dedicated line, I figured maybe the reps from the Chase general credit card department wouldn't be as knowledgeable about that stuff, so I called that number instead. The rep there closed the card without trouble but didn't mention anything about the annual fee so I asked when I would get it back, he took a quick look and said that since I was charged for it in my last statement I should see a refund within a few business days.

I logged in today and saw the full AF refund. Pfew.

So a few interesting things:

* The second rep made it sound like the refund was automatic, he wasn't even thinking about it. That makes me wonder if the first rep was bluffing, or if they have ways to manually deny the AF refund when closing a card.

* I doubt the first ref came up with this on her own, especially since she immediately went to that when I asked to cancel. My guess is that the Chase Ritz department received a memo about this?

* Clearly that is not hardcoded in their system yet, but maybe it will be eventually? My guess is that this "use the credit then get the AF back" trick became much more of an issue because of the hugely popular Chase Sapphire Reserve and Chase is starting to crack down on it, so it may become harder or maybe even impossible to do this in the future. Definitely something to keep an eye on.