Originally Posted by
jkirk
Would welcome any advice on my current predicament trying to book an Edit property for January through Chase Travel using my new Sapphire Reserve Business card. Trying to book the Grand Hotel des Bains Kempinski, in St. Moritz, Switzerland, for a six night stay next January. The property closes each year for a few weeks in August/September to transition to ski season. I can't find any availability through the Chase portal for any dates after the September closure. The Kempinski website offers plenty of availability, as do the major commercial portals, Amex Platinum Travel, etc., although Kempinski offers better rates than the others. But when I try to book through Chase, it says "Rate Unavailable. Try Again Later or Choose Another Property." I've tried calling Chase Travel, and they try booking manually and come back and say things like "yes, we can see there are rooms available, and we can see rates, but we aren't able to access that inventory, sorry."
I want to book using Chase Sapphire because I want to take advantage of the rate guarantee (so that Chase will match the Kempinksi rate) and to hit my required $20k spend in the first two months of having the card to earn the 150k bonus. Plus 8 points per mile on a booking that will add up to $10k or so isn't nothing. Anyone have any helpful insights?
I witnessed multiple examples of hotels that listed as Edit properties not having availability on Chase but available booking direct or through other 3rd party sites.
Stayed in Bali - recently on an Edit stay but of the 12 or so properties that claim to be Edit ones at most 6 showed up on any of the dates I was searching. Despite none of the other hotels being sold out or did not have availability elsewhere. I was traveling during a shoulder season not high season.
Hanoi, Vietnam for my dates the Edit only showed the Capella - which is really high priced IMO as available even though there were a couple other more reasonable quality hotels listed as Edit properties and available on other sites for the same dates.
Chase or the properties are controlling the release/availability so nothing you can do and it may or may not become available.
Below is my opinion only:
in the case of Bali I feel the site was keeping the lower cost options as unavailable on lower cost dates and those "edit" properties are only Edit properties in high season when their rates are more in line with other Edit properties or possibly they revolve the options so there is not an excess of choice for a small area.