Greg recently wrote Rethinking The Edit by Chase Travel℠, a post where he shared his updated thoughts about the value of The Edit hotel bookings when redeeming points if you have a Chase Sapphire Reserve® card.
Well, it appears that he’s going to need to re-rethink his assessment of The Edit.
That’s because someone on Reddit has highlighted that Chase has edited The Edit. It’s no longer guaranteed that you’ll get to credit 2 cents per point (cpp) of value for The Edit which is something that will no doubt lead some Sapphire Reserve cardholders to say fuhgeddabouttheedit.
When Chase first launched The Edit, some readers noticed a couple of instances where redemptions of Ultimate Rewards points at The Edit properties weren’t being calculated at a 2cpp value. We reached out to Chase to highlight the instances where redemptions weren’t being calculated at a 2cpp valuation and those were promptly fixed.
Over the past 24 hours or so, I’d seen a couple of mentions/comments where people had highlighted that The Edit bookings they’d been looking to make weren’t being calculated at 2cpp. I’d initially assumed that these were glitches rather than it being a devaluation of the program fewer than six full months after it was launched, but sadly that’s not the case.
Reader EP150 directed us to this Reddit post. Again, I initially figured that the person who started that thread had simply encountered a one-off property that wasn’t being calculated properly. That is, until I started scrolling down.
For starters, many Redditors shared their examples of not getting 2cpp of value. That was a bad enough sign, but what appears to be the nail in the guaranteed value coffin is that Chase has updated the wording on its website to no longer assure you of 2cpp of value for The Edit bookings.
Grantwwu used the Wayback Machine to confirm that Chase’s website used to state that your points are worth 2x when redeemed for The Edit bookings if you have a Sapphire Reserve card.
Originally, the terms on Chase’s website stated the following (our bolding):
If you have a Chase Sapphire Reserve card and you use Points Boost, your points are worth 2x when you book a hotel that’s part of The Edit℠, and up to 2x when redeemed for both thousands of other top-booked hotels and flights with select airlines through Chase Travel.
However, that same page now states the following (our bolding):
If you have a Chase Sapphire Reserve card and you use Points Boost, your points are worth up to 2x when you book a hotel that’s part of The Edit℠, and up to 2x when redeemed for other top-booked hotels and flights with select airlines through Chase Travel.
See the difference? That page used to say ‘your points are worth 2x,’ but now it says ‘your points are worth up to 2x.’ It’s never good when anything in this hobby says ‘up to’ because it often ends up meaning ‘rarely’ and it most certainly means that 2x isn’t guaranteed.
Based on our initial observations, it appears that while you can still get 2cpp of value for some The Edit bookings, there are many others where you’ll only get 1.65cpp of value. In effect, that’s a 17.5% devaluation for redemptions at those properties.
For example, in the screenshot below you can see two hotels in New York. The Fifth Avenue Hotel costs $3,438 for two nights, or 171,901 Ultimate Rewards points – a 2cpp value. However, the Wythe Hotel costs $,1370 for the two nights or 83,044 points. Although it’s marked as a Points Boost hotel and that it’s part of The Edit, that equates to only 1.65cpp of value.
It would be bad enough if there were more than just a handful of examples of this devalued pricing, but it seems to be even worse than that. When checking hotels in New York, Greg found 18 properties where you could redeem Ultimate Rewards for 2cpp of value, but 23 others that had a lower redemption level.
The fact that you now get less than 2cpp of value at more than half the properties in a major US city using one of the flagship benefits of Chase’s updated Sapphire Reserve card is an incredibly disappointing development, especially coming less than six months after it launched. It definitely gives the impression that they wanted plaudits for the 2cpp guaranteed redemption ability immediately after the card’s revamp, only to hope that the subsequent devaluation would be missed/ignored/forgotten just a few months down the line.
We’ve reached out to Chase about this development, so we’ll update this post if/when we receive some kind of statement.
In the meantime, the Frequent Miler Bonvoyed of the Year awards are coming up in the next week or so and Chase seems to be making a late push for winning that unwanted award. If they manage to snatch it out of the hands of Southwest this year, it’ll be a truly impressive feat.
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Good riddance, Flights points boost and now Edit hotel points boost?! WTF Chase!!!
Just last week or two, I noticed that the points boost offerings have been scaled back for premium cabin flights. I last used this benefit in August when booking TPE-DPS on EVA. Now, I do not see any points boost options intra Asia. Around September, I was eyeing EK BKK-HKG in J and using points boost since it came up as an option. Now, there’s nothing.
If i remember correctly, when this points boost started, points boost options would show up any business/first itinerary on a handful of airlines (UA, AC, EVA, Ek, etc) regardless of origin/destination. Now, it’s just itineraries FROM the US.
Its genius that Chase calls it The Edit, since they can edit it at any time.
Funny how the CSR started out so well and now it really makes very little sense.
I’m still mad they never sided with me on a chargeback during COVID. But thankfully I could have a credit out there with Azerbaijan Airways!
I can confirm this change happened in the days after Greg’s article . Immediately after the article I had seen an IHG property in Tokyo for 2 cpp and today same is 1.65 cpp. Should we blame Greg for this lol. Well atleast Chase seems to be reading FM
They still have the original wording in some parts of the site/app: “Your points are worth 2x on The Edit –hand-picked hotels with exclusive benefits through Chase Travel.”
This is found by going to the Chase Travel portal, scrolling down, clicking on “Learn more” under “Discover The Edit by Chase TravelSM”, then it’s at the bottom of that page under “Introducing Points Boost”.
It seems this wasn’t a very well-executed rollout.
Lets not forget, initially when the CSR card was launched, stays at the Edit INCLUDED breakfast for two. They have since EDITed the policy to state “it may include breakfast for two”. We called Chase to verify and they indeed did.
Just do a search for Vegas hotels you will see many Edit properties, some offer the Breakfast credit while other do not. 🙁
Talk about a bait and switch!
So as I read it, Greg’s gotta subedit his The Edit Credit copyedit, how he said it, and accredit Reddit. What a discredit to The Edit.
You said it!
I don’t see how anyone can beat Mesa for the Bonvoy Cup this year.
It is a scope vs. magnitude issue. Mesa by far had the worst action, but may not win due to the limited “blast radius.”
US Bank has probably objectively done worse actions than Chase as well, but again, the USBAR was more of a niche offering compared to the CSR/CSP.
It will come down to, do you think the chase CSR refresh including this Edit nerf is a total dumpster fire compared to Citi/Amex premium card refreshes.
Chase just keeps giving more reasons to downgrade my CSR come renewal time next year. All of the credits have been a pain to use, even living in a major US city. The Edit has been an overpriced disaster, especially compared to AmEx FHR. Chase really should have gotten more properties on board before launch. AmEx has figured out the premium card market. Everyone else is just fighting for scraps. Best of luck to you Chase. Enjoy the middling and low-end card market.
Chase beating Southwest for Bonvoy would be pretty insane as the Southwest CEO months after saying “free bags are never going away”, went away. Southwest has effectively destroyed a brand that took decades to build and alienated their customers.
As ridiculous as the CSR has become, Chase didn’t destroy their entire brand and credibility.
I firmly believe Southwest will be a case study taught in university for years to come on how to destroy a beloved company.
Just get a Rapid Rewards Credit Card and up to 8 people on a reservation can each check in a bag for free. Then get a Companion Pass for easily one of the best deals in the industry. SW returned to profitability this year after multiple years in the red.
Added to list of reasons why I’ll be cancelling early next year.
CSR portal also has gutted a lot of Edit hotels now – e.g., Beijing, China used to list 6-7 edit hotels, but now only two very expensive hotels are listed. It is definitely not hidden, because I searched for a specific hotel (Four Seasons Beijing, have an existing booking and tried to change stay dates); but when using the Chase Freedom card account, all Edit hotels are listed.
Also, for United bookings, it states 1.5x point boost for economy fares, however basically economy fare is not available. For a cheap round trip united flights, I am not getting 1.5x because there is a $70 markup from United basic economy to economy fare.
All in all, CSR sucks. Cannot wait to get rid of it when my next card renewal hits.
As is the case with many others, I experienced coupon-book-exhaustion. With an eye towards simplification, earlier in the year, I determined that I would trim down to one premium card. For me, the refreshed CSR is less easy to use. For others, the CSR might be perfect. In the end, the Amex Platinum was easier and a better fit. So, I downgraded our CSR. At that time, I thought it would be difficult for Chase to do something that could win me back. Since then, little data points have reinforced that thought. This devaluation is another. Redemption rates on travel portal airfare bookings is yet another.
To use Chase’s language, I plan to keep “up to” one CSR in my wallet.
The real question is what the cash pricing is. After launch, the cash pricing on many Edit properties was wildly inflated compared to FHR and others. So it was useless for cash bookings. For PointsBoost! they may have offered 2.0cpp, but in reality you were getting more like ~1.65cpp because the pricing was inflated. So if they’ve adjusted the cash pricing back down to reality and you are now getting 1.65cpp, at least that is honest, which is more than we could say about The Edit / PointsBoost at launch. But I have not dived into the latest pricing, so…
All that said, this has to be the most ridiculous revamp of a card ever? Chase just keeps doing things this year that have completely destroyed its reputation in the market place. The only good news for Chase is that there’s only 15 more days left in the year.
There’s still 2026, 2027, and onwards to make the card worse! Thankfully we will all have gotten rid of it by then.