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, although I’m not convinced it’ll work for The Edit bookings seeing as the inclusions for that are unlikely to match any other publicly-available booking channel. 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.
Bear in mind that reservations booked through Chase Travel℠ won’t earn points with hotel loyalty programs, you won’t receive elite status benefits, you won’t earn elite night credits, etc.
In order to make a Price Match Guarantee claim, it sounds like you have to make a booking. Once you’ve done that, in the Trip Details you should see a link to submit a claim.
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This seems like total garbage to me. The 24 hour deadline and exact match policy seem so restrictive (for example ruling out “member only” rates that everyone intelligent enough to spend ten seconds signing up for a loyalty program can access), and the minuscule details of what’s included with a booking vary so widely across platforms that it’s hard to imagine that anyone will ever actually manage to claim the guarantee.
This is similar to how all hotel Best Rate Guarantee features work. They limit it to 24 hours because prices can sometimes fluctuate quite a bit.
With regards to members-only rates, it remains to be seen whether they’ll exclude things like Hilton Honors member rates. I suspect not, but I might be wrong. I think it’s more likely that it’s relating to things like Club1 Hotels where you pay an annual fee and (theoretically) get access to lower hotel rates.
I’ve made quite a few Best Rate Guarantee claims over the years (albeit not using Chase’s Price Match Guarantee) and had many successful claims, so hopefully Chase’s new feature won’t be overly stringent.
One thing that is annoying is that the refund policy must match. At many hotels I have been looking at, the Chase Travel refund policy is 1 day more lenient than the hotel’s own policy.
For instance, I was looking at an IHG booking with a May 19th check-in. IHG has many non-refundable types of bookings, and many progressively-more-expensive rates with better refund policies, but the one with the latest cancellation was May 17th. Whereas Chase Travel’s was refundable through the 18th. For almost all intents and purposes, that is virtually the same, but Chase could easily look at that and say they’re not equivalent. And the Chase Travel rate was ~$70 per night more expensive.
How to submit the claim? Will it be a lot work? Also, file the claim within 24 hours of reservation?
I’ve just added a paragraph at the end of the post to explain this. Apparently you have to make a booking, then in the Trip Details you’ll have an option to submit a Price Match Guarantee claim.
Good in-theory, but good-luck getting them to honor this with dynamic pricing, etc.
Depends on how they administer this, tbh. I’ve had OTAs deny a price match because one site’s room description was listed as non-smoking while the matching site was silent on smoking or non-smoking. Whole hotel was advertised as non-smoking, so obviously both rooms were identical. I’ve increasingly felt as though many price match policies are effectively impossible to actually take advantage of. Only time will tell if Chase’s implementation is something that’ll actually be usable.
How and where do you submit a claim? On the Chase site (Link?) or do you have to call them?
In similar price match situations, I’ve identified the better rate prior to booking then called in and provided the agent with the better price. It worked for me.
Ugh. A phone call. That’s the worst. Yuck. LOL. Glad it worked for you.
I’ve just added a paragraph at the end of the post to explain this. Apparently you have to make a booking, then in the Trip Details you’ll have an option to submit a Price Match Guarantee claim.
How would it work for the Edit bookings as it usually includes free breakfast and some type of credit?
Edit booking would likely be compared to a competitor’s booking with similar benefits. Amex FHR. Capital One Premier Collection, Citi Travel’s Reserve. Don’t forget the Visa Conciege and Mastercard Concierge channels.
Isn’t it exclusive to Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business?
The terms specifically state the Sapphire Reserve for Business, the Sapphire Reserve, and the JP Morgan Reserve
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.
Aren’t you contradicting your post?
“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.“
You’re right – for some reason I’d thought that in the terms it mentioned The Edit, but it doesn’t – I’ll update that in the post.
So in reality this is potentially good for non-Edit bookings made with Chase when compared to direct bookings with the hotel itself?
Yep