Originally Posted by
Cheesemaster200
So doing research about a potential future trip to Europe in a month or two. I have a hoard of UR points that I want to use before they change the redemption rate. Looked a few hotels, all with the same disturbing trend:
InterContinental Lyon:
Shows a classic room on the IHG website for ~300EUR. UR portal does not show a classic room, only has a Premium room. Premium room is 374EUR on the Intercontinental website, refundable with tax/fees. Premium room on UR website is $596. This was an Edit hotel.
Badrutt's Palace St. Moritz:
Shows a king village room on the website for 806CHF on the hotel website. Includes breakfast, refundable. The UR website does not even show this, or multiple other similarly priced rooms. They only have the $2500 suites available for booking.
I have seen both of these things before, though never to the same extend and not as common. It looks like Chase is playing the game of both (significantly) marking up travel bookings for hotels, and then also steering redemption awards to high-value rooms. That is, Chase steers their redemptions to high margin "upgraded" rooms that have high availability, likely splits the difference, and then marks the room up of the direct rate to boot. I previously saw this when booking hotels in London a year or two back, but it was not nearly as egregious.
I was previously planning on dealing with the new "upgrades" in stride, but if this is how they are going to manage their "points boost" then I am taking a hard pass. Anyone else have similar experiences?
Yes I've seen the same with several hotels both Edit and non-Edit and have also seen where the exact same room type is way more expensive than booking direct.
I did recently call them because the difference for a 4 night stay for the identical room type and refundability rate type was ~$1500+ than booking direct which I thought was bizarre. This was not an Edit hotel and I stayed there last year for 6 nights where Chase was about $100 more than direct but I wanted to use my points vs paying money out of pocket so I swallowed that difference. However, $1500 is just not something I was going to swallow. The rep saw exactly what I did and agreed with me that it did not make any sense and should not be that way. She said she would open an internal ticket and I should call back in several days to see if there was any update which I haven't gotten a chance to do yet.
But this has become more and more prevalent and I'm seeing it with many hotels outside of the USA - even accounting for exchange rate variability, the upcharge with Chase just doesn't make one ounce of sense and it makes it very frustrating to not be able to use my points effectively.