Award reservation changed from points to cert
 

I and several friends are going to be in MUC for an overnight next week. Several months ago, I booked three rooms at the Ren MUC because they could be had for 20,000 points each on pointsavers. As the rack rate at the time was 284 Euro per room, this was a significant value.

This morning I woke up to find that one of my 20,000 point rooms had been canceled and rebooked using my Visa anniversary cat1-5 certificate that was on my account. As I can use that cat1-5 certificate at a property charging 25,000 points (and plan to in CLE next month), this results in lost value to me. While 5,000 points is certainly not that big of a deal, I like to think I can stretch the value of that cert a little farther.

I plan on calling the plat line here in a bit to see if they will kindly reinstate my cert and use the 20,000 points as I had originally booked it, but I wanted to see if anyone else had this sort of thing happen to them or if I've missed some particular stipulation somewhere that says all certs must be used before points can be used.

I spoke with the rewards line this morning and the agent fixed the reservation in 30 seconds. According to him and the reservations agent, the property made the change on the reservation. I asked why they might do something like this and he related that if they were processing the reservation and saw the cert on my account, they took that one instead of using my points. He corrected it and now all is well.

No big deal in the end. I guess the moral of the story is to always keep an eye on your reservations. :)