The Edit vs Amex: My experience at Pendry Chicago (and a point mystery)

Recently, my wife and I spent three nights at the Pendry Chicago hotel. I had booked the first two nights through The Edit by Chase Travel℠ and the third night through Amex’s Fine Hotels + Resorts® (FHR). Despite the fact that these luxury hotel programs offer very similar benefits, I discovered interesting differences during this stay. As expected, one advantage of the FHR part of the stay was that I was automatically granted a 4 PM late check-out. I was surprised, though, to find some advantages to booking through Chase as well. Please note that my experience was just with one property over a single long weekend. Your experience is very likely to differ.

Background

American Express’ Platinum cards offer rebates for two hotel collections with elite-like benefits during your stay: Fine Hotels + Resorts (FHR) and The Hotel Collection (THC). Similarly, Chase’s Sapphire Reserve® cards offer rebates for The Edit by Chase Travel℠. The following table summarises the advertised perks of each collection:

In a previous post, I did a deep dive into hotels in two cities (New York and London) that were available through both Amex and Chase collections. I came to the following conclusions (with this admittedly small sample size):

• Amex has far more properties in its collection
• You’re more likely to get a better price through Amex than through Chase. On the other hand, with The Edit, you do have a very good chance (around 60%) of finding prices that are equal to or (rarely) better than Amex’s.
• If you want to use points to pay for your stay, you’ll do much better with Chase than with Amex since Amex doesn’t offer Points Boosts at all.

My Pendry Experience Overview

I booked Thursday and Friday night through Chase after logging in with my Sapphire Reserve® card. This $607.62 stay qualified for the card’s $250 The Edit credit and the $250 credit for select Chase Travel℠ hotels (2026 only, so far). Knowing that Pendry was on the list of qualifying brands for the latter, I paid $500 with my card and the rest in points. As expected, Chase automatically credited me with two $250 rebates. A 2x points boost was available for the Pendry, so I paid only 5,381 points to cover the remaining $107.62.

I booked Saturday night through Amex Fine Hotels + Resorts. The all-in total for the night was $293.50, but $41.09 was due to be paid at the hotel for the hotel’s destination fee, so I paid only $252.41 with my Amex Platinum card. Amex automatically credited me $252.41, and I still have nearly $60 credit available from the Platinum card’s twice-annual $300 hotel credit.

Mostly Identical Experiences

In many ways, my experience at The Prendry was the same with both bookings. Specifically, these benefits were identical:

• No room upgrade: Unless they counted moving us to a high floor as an upgrade, our room wasn’t special. This may have been my fault for the Amex part of the stay. When I checked into the Chase part of the stay, I asked if we could be kept in the same room for all three nights. This may have prevented us from receiving an upgrade for the third night.
• Welcome amenity: We received a small box of chocolates at the start of each stay.
• Free breakfast for two: In both cases, we were given a $60 daily credit for breakfast. This wasn’t actually enough to make breakfast free, but it came reasonably close.
• $100 stay credit: In both cases, charges to our room beyond the $60 breakfast credit (food & drink, in our case) were automatically deducted, up to a total of $100 per stay.
• No elite benefits: Pendry Chicago is a member of Preferred Hotels & Resorts. Both luxury hotel programs claim that you should earn hotel points and elite benefits when booking through their programs. I have top-tier I Prefer Titanium status, so I should have received a complimentary food & beverage offering, but I didn’t. When I asked at the desk, I was told that they only offer points as benefits at the Pendry.

Chase Advantages

There were a few advantages to booking through Chase for this stay:

• 2x Points Boost: I paid for the stay partly with cash (in order to earn Chase rebates) and partly with points. While Chase no longer guarantees a 2x Points Boost for The Edit, it was offered for this stay. Therefore, my points were worth 2 cents each towards the cash portion of the booking.
• Prepaid destination fee: The Pendry charges a $35 per-day destination fee (41.09 after taxes). This fee was prepaid through Chase. The advantage is that I was able to pay the destination fee with points (using the 2x Points Boost). This feature can be a negative in some cases: Some hotels have been known to charge guests again for destination fees. That didn’t happen to me here. Additionally, at Hyatt properties, top-tier Hyatt Globalists are supposed to have destination fees waived (they can contact Chase to try to get a refund after the stay). This wasn’t a Hyatt property, so this wasn’t an issue here.
• The $100 stay credit was more flexible: At the Pendry, Chase’s stay credit could be used for food & beverages or at the hotel’s “retail space” (a wall with some items for sale), whereas the Amex credit was limited to food & beverage purchases.
• Points earned automatically (maybe): I earned some I Prefer points, and I think they came from the Chase part of my stay, but I’m not sure. See the section titled “The I Prefer Points Mystery,” below.

Amex Advantages

And, here were the advantages to the Amex portion of our stay:

• Single-night stays are allowed: Chase requires a 2-night stay to qualify for the Sapphire Reserve® card’s $250 The Edit credit. Amex’s Fine Hotels + Resorts stays can be booked for a single night, and you’ll still qualify for Amex Platinum hotel credits. This is obviously useful for single-night stays, but it’s also useful for multi-night stays if you have multiple Platinum cards, since you can earn a rebate for each one by making separate back-to-back bookings (note, though, that you’ll only get a single $100 stay credit when you do this).
• My Amex booking was slightly cheaper: The per-night price through Amex was $10.31 cheaper than through Chase.
• Guaranteed 4 PM late check-out: The Pendry automatically set up a 4 PM late check-out for us on Sunday. With a Chase booking, late check-out is not guaranteed, and there’s no 4 PM promise.

The I Prefer Points Mystery

Pendry Chicago is a member of Preferred Hotels & Resorts. Amex and Chase claim that you should earn hotel points and elite benefits when booking through their programs. I entered my Preferred Hotel’s I Prefer number into both bookings. And both showed up in my I Prefer account, both before and after the stay. As mentioned above, I didn’t receive any elite benefits during this stay. But I did earn some points…

A week after my stay, I received an email from I Prefer Hotel Rewards congratulating me for having earned points: “Congratulations! You earned 6,210 I Prefer Points from your stay at Pendry Chicago.”

The problem was that the email didn’t say which stay earned points. Were the points from the Chase-booked stay or the Amex-booked stay?

The mystery deepened when I looked at my I Prefer points activity online:

Point earnings:

There were several confusing things about the online points activity, as shown above:

1. It appeared they had reversed the 6,210 points, but they are still in my account.
2. There is no way to click to see more information about the points activity.
3. The “posted” date for both the award and the reversal is listed as Jan 30. That’s bizarre because it’s the only day of the weekend when I neither checked in nor checked out of the hotel. I checked into the Chase part of the stay on January 29th and checked out on January 31. For the Amex part of the stay, I checked in on January 31 and checked out on February 1.
4. I can’t figure out how they decided to award 6,210 points. The base rate for the Chase stay was $607.62. With my Titanium status, I should have earned 15 points per dollar for a total of 7,020 points. Maybe the base rate that I Prefer sees is less than the base rate reported by Chase? How about Amex? The Amex base rate was $215, so I should have earned 215 x 15 = 3,225 points from that stay. That’s far short of the 6,210 points I earned. However, I was also enrolled in an I Prefer double-points promo. If that was applied to this stay, then I should have earned either 5,375 points (if my elite bonus wasn’t doubled) or 6,450 points (if my elite bonus was doubled).

So… which stay resulted in points?

A case for Chase:

• The date the points were posted was in the middle of the Chase stay.
• The number of points I expected from the Chase stay (assuming the double points promo didn’t apply) was reasonably close to the number of points delivered. I expected 7,020 points but received 6,210.

A case for Amex:

• The number of points I expected from the Amex stay, assuming the I Prefer double-points promo did apply, was close to the number of points delivered:
  • If my elite bonus wasn’t doubled, then I expected 5,375 points, but received 6,210
  • If my elite bonus was doubled, then I expected 6,450 points, but received 6,210

A case for neither:

There are two scenarios in which the points can’t be attributed to either stay:

1. Mistake: Maybe I Prefer made a mistake in awarding points at all. Then they tried to correct the mistake, but didn’t properly remove the points from my account. This is plausible since my account activity shows the points being removed (even though they weren’t).
2. Manual points: During the stay (I forget which day, but it could have been January 30th), I asked at the desk about elite benefits. The desk agent, after inquiring “in the back,” told me they only provide points at the Pendry, not elite benefits. Maybe she then manually awarded me points based on a calculation only she knows.

My bet: Chase

I think that it’s most likely that points were awarded from my Chase-booked stay. In many ways, I Prefer seems like a half-baked rewards program, so it’s not particularly surprising to me to find that the number of points awarded was not predictable using math.

My Pendry Experience Details

Overall, we thought the Pendry was fine, but we wouldn’t be excited to stay again. We liked the hotel restaurant and our room’s shower (endless hot water and good pressure). On the other hand, our room’s decor was bland, the walls were noticeably not soundproof, and there was a stupid alarm clock that went off early in the morning after our second night. Can someone please outlaw alarm clocks in hotel rooms?

Details about our experience with The Edit and Fine Hotels + Resort benefits at The Pendry follow…

Welcome letters

At check-in, I explained that I had back-to-back reservations, and I asked to be kept in the same room for both stays. The desk agent then printed out the benefits for both parts of the stay (as shown above). He also specifically noted that the $100 property credit from Chase could be used at the hotel’s retail space, whereas the $100 credit from Amex could not. That was a surprising difference! In the following table, I’ve listed the differences I found between the two welcome letters:

Room upgrade

We were on a very high floor, so maybe that was considered an upgrade. Otherwise, I believe this was the same room type we had booked.

Welcome Amenity

We received these chocolates at the start of each stay. They were delicious!

Daily Breakfast for 2

The hotel breakfast was great, but $60 per day wasn’t enough to cover breakfast for two. One day, we each ordered coffee plus one of the cheapest breakfast items (yoghurt and granola), and the total still exceeded $60 after fees and tip.

$100 Property Credit

In addition to spending more than $60 per day on breakfast, we had lunch at the hotel one day and a light dinner with drinks the next. The Chase $100 property credit fully covered our breakfast overages and lunch (with almost $5 left unused). The Amex $100 property credit covered most of our dinner at the hotel. In both cases, the credits were applied automatically based on our room charges.

Early check-in, late check-out

We didn’t need early check-in or late check-out. If we had needed them, I have no idea if we would have been offered either with our Chase stay. With our Amex stay, we were automatically given 4 PM late check-out (which we didn’t need).

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