Chase Travel℠ has recently added the ability for Chase Sapphire Reserve®, Sapphire Reserve for Business℠, and JPMorgan Reserve cardholders to take advantage of their new Price Match Guarantee policy when making hotel bookings through the travel portal.
Per the Chase Travel℠ site, here are the requirements to take advantage of the Price Match Guarantee:
- The Chase Travel hotel reservation must have been pre-paid using points, cash, partially using a promo code, or a combination of these payment methods. Reservations using solely promo codes are not eligible.
- The competing room rate must be an exact match to the original reservation, including hotel name, address, dates, room type, bed type, refund policy, number of guests, and currency (USD).
- Price Match Guarantee is solely based on the difference in room rates excluding taxes, fees, and other charges.
- The nightly rate difference must be greater than $5.
- The Chase Travel hotel reservation must be unmodified and uncancelled.
- You must book the hotel in your Chase Travel account connected to a qualifying Chase credit card (JPMorgan Reserve, Sapphire Reserve. and Sapphire Reserve for Business).
- You must submit your claim within 24 hours after you booked a hotel with Chase Travel.
There are a number of exclusions too:
- Non-public or wholesale hotel rates.
- Rates that are part of a vacation package (hotel + air, hotel + car, etc.) or promotional bundles.
- Vacation rentals.
- Rates including additional or optional amenities (parking, meals, entertainment, etc.).
- Room rates from opaque sites (where the hotel name is revealed only after booking).
- Rates that are promotional (for example, mobile only promotions and sales), loyalty, member-only, group, corporate negotiated rates, meeting, AAA, government/military, senior citizen, coupon-based rates or requires a membership to access.
- Flights, rental car, activities, cruises, and other travel services.
- Same day hotel bookings. Your reservation must have been made at least 24-hours before check-in.
In order to take advantage of their Price Match Guarantee, you have to submit your claim within 24 hours of making a reservation and at least 24 hours before the check-in time. When making the claim, you have to provide the lower price that you saw, a screenshot that shows the lower price and the same reservation details, as well as a link to where you saw the lower price.
This is a nice addition for Sapphire Reserve and Sapphire Reserve for Business cardholders, especially seeing as it’ll work not only for regular hotel bookings, but for The Edit bookings too. The Price Match Guarantee is also valid for bookings with cash or points, so that’ll be useful if you’re also taking advantage of the Points Boost feature on Chase Travel℠.
What’s a little bit of a shame is that Chase is only guaranteeing to match the price. With most hotel chains, if you submit a successful Best Rate Guarantee / Price Match Guarantee claim, they’ll not only match the lower price, but they’ll also either give you an additional discount or award bonus points. Still, being able to at least match the price is better than nothing.
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As a holder of a grandfathered Sapphire Reserve card (large pre-couponification balance redeemable at the old 50% bonus), this is HUGE.
I’m currently at a Thailand property that I paid cash for because Chase Travel priced it about 15% higher ($199 or 13,267 URs) than what could be found on Booking[dot]com and Agoda (the latter was $160, which would have translated to 10,667 points).
The caveat is that many third-party sites like Agoda or Booking stealthfully apply discounts via their apps or in the form of automatically-applied coupons and promotions, so one will have to be especially vigilant to make sure that all of the terms and conditions are met.
So, for example, does this mean that the Edit price matches to Amex Travel FHR / Hotel Collection? Or is that a “non-public” rate that includes “additional amenities”?
That won’t be valid as the benefits will be different and it’s (card) membership-based rather than it being a publicly available rate anyone can book.