No guaranteed reservation for hotel booking when arriving at 1 AM through Chase Travel
I used Chase travel to book us a 2 night stay at a Hyatt hotel for my nephews graduation weekend. I used Chase travel so I could try to get some of that $500 hotel credit Given the annual fee of the reserve card, I didn't think twice about whether the reservation was valid. Boy was I wrong!
Our flight ended up running late so we didn't get to the hotel until 1 am. At that point we were informed that the hotel didn't have any rooms. Uhhhh.... what? ...but I have a reservation....? Exactly what was "reserved"? I called the Chase customer support line and after validating I was who I said I was she proceeded to go through this long script of "thanking" me for being a valued reward member. I had to cut her off telling her it was 1:30 in the morning and I was more interesting in solving our hotel problem so we could get to bed. After explaining the problem, she asked to put us on hold for 10-15 minutes while they tried to sort it out with the hotel. 15 mins later, she came back and asked if we would prefer a refund, or if she should continue looking for space at other hotels.
We opted to keep looking and she asked to put us on another 10-15 minute hold. At this point it was 2 am, we were exhausted, and I didn't see an end to this given that all the hotels were booked up for graduation weekend, so I woke up my relatives and asked to sleep on their floor.
The icing on the cake was customer support coming back and acting like they were going out of their way to give us great service by giving us our money back. Uhhh... yes you will give us our money back, BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE A ROOM! I chatted with the agent for another 10 minutes explaining my frustration with the card and no concessions from them were made even though they held some responsibility for this mess. I'm sure if they had been able to get us a different hotel, it wouldn't have qualified for part of the $500 credit and I would have just been out the money altogether.
Given some previous posts in this sub about Lyft upping rates when you are using this card benefit, the quality of some of the "Priority Pass" lounges, and this new experience, its proving to be a lot more difficult than I thought to recover some of the expenses of this annual fee.