How to find hidden Capital One Premier Collection hotels

Overnight, Capital One ended one of the best hotel promotions we’ve seen this year. Through 12/31/23 or “while supplies last” (spoiler alert: supplies ran out last night) Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card and Capital One Business Venture X Rewards Credit Card holders had the chance to get $200 off on a Premier Collection hotel booking. That meant that some hotels could be booked for a single night for free or very close to it (and those bookings included free breakfast for two and a $100 credit). Unfortunately, that deal is now dead. However, if you checked out the deal and searched for hotels and did not find any properties that worked for you, it is possible that you weren’t searching right (or that you weren’t patient enough). Here’s how to find what you’re looking for the next time Capital One runs an incredible promotion (or you’re looking to use your annual travel credit on a Premier Collection hotel).

Capital One Premier Collection

For those unfamiliar, Capital One Premier Collection is essentially Capital One’s offering for Venture X and Venture X business cardholders that competes with Amex Fine Hotels & Resorts, Chase Luxury Hotel Collection, Virtuoso, and the sort.

When you book through Capital One Premier Collection (which, again, is only available for Venture X and Business Venture X cardholders), you get the following benefits:

• Earn 10x miles on every booking
• Daily complimentary breakfast for 2
• Experience credit of $100 (typically something like a $100 food & beverage credit)
• Complimentary WiFi
• Room upgrade, early check-in, and late checkout based on availability

What makes Capital One’s Premier Collection stand out a bit is the fact that they have partnered with hotels that in many cases are not found on other luxury booking platforms (at the very least, there is far less overlap than you’ll find with most other programs like this). Whether that’s a positive or negative is open for debate; some will appreciate that it isn’t just the same old properties you’ve seen on other platforms, others would probably be happy to have multiple platforms under which to book the same hotel.

A common question we get is: “Can you use your Capital One Venture X annual $300 travel credit toward a Premier Collection hotel and still get all of the Premier Collection benefits?”. The answer is yes, you certainly can.

Capital One Lifestyle Collection

The Lifestyle Collection is another collection of upscale properties where bookings through Capital One earn benefits. However, the list of benefits is significantly smaller:

• $50 experience credit
• Earn 10x miles on every booking

Note that Lifestyle Collection bookings were not included in the recent promotion but are another option to consider for getting extra value when booking through Capital One Travel.

The incredible promotion that ended far too soon

Stephen wrote a couple of days ago about an incredible promotion that Capital One was running: Venture X and Venture X business cardholders were able to get $200 off on a Premier Collection booking through 12/31/23 or “while supplies last”. To be clear, that meant that you theoretically had to book by 12/31, but the stay could occur any time through the end of schedule (which ran until early September).

That was an amazing deal because you there are some Premier Collection hotels that sometimes cost right around $200 that would be free or very close to free with that promotion — and you’d still get free breakfast for two and a $100 credit at the hotel.

Unsurprisingly, the promotion did not last until 12/31. Frankly, I’m surprised it lasted a full 24hrs+. This was a nice win for those who got in on the deal quickly.

That said, some readers reported having difficulty finding hotels. For the first hours after the promotion began, many Premier Collection properties showed up as “unavailable” for booking. By yesterday morning, many of those properties had once again become available. If you searched early and didn’t look again yesterday, you probably missed some easy opportunities to use the credit.

But that wasn’t the only thing that might have caused you to miss out on it. Capital One’s search tool is far from intuitive, which can cause you to miss Premier Collection properties that are sort of “hidden away”.

The Premium Stays tab is not your friend

The most important thing to understand is that Capital One has a “Premium Stays” tab where you can presumably search only for hotels in the Premier Collection or Lifestyle Collection. In fact, if you went to the “Travel Deals” section of Capital One Travel and found the Premier Collection promotion for $200 off and clicked through the “Book now” button, it took you to the Premium Stays search tab as seen here:

However, that tab is relatively useless. I don’t recommend bothering with it.

The reason I say that is because you may type in a city, like “Venice” and get a pop-down from the search box saying that there are no premium stays found in Venice.

However, that’s not true — there are Premier Collection properties in Venice. For some reason, the search tool won’t find them if you search from “Premium Stays”. However, if you instead click the “Hotels” tab at the top and search all hotels in Venice (or hit “Search All Hotels” in that pop-down box shown above), you will find that there are indeed Premier Collection and Lifestyle Collection properties in Venice.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen that pattern repeat time and time again. You definitely want to use the main “Hotels” tab.

And that’s not the only problem with the Capital One Travel Search tool.

Patience, my dear Venture X cardholder!

Perhaps the weirdest quirk of the Capital One Travel site is the way it seems to only load results in short batches. That is to say that when you hit “search” and it brings you to results, the search isn’t even close to finished. If you’ve ever used Point.me, Capital One Travel seems to work on approximately the same time-frame, where some results populate right away and others consistently take quite a while.

If you see the number of hotels found just above the search results and you watch that number, you will see it continue to rise as you wait for the results to finish loading. It tends to start around 20 or 30 and move up to 40 or 50, 60 or 80, etc. as it continues to load results.

The maddening thing is that, in some cases, Premier Collection hotels load very slowly. If you search for hotels in Nice, France, you’ll initially only see regular hotels, nothing in the Premier or Lifestyle Collections. And if you put on the “Premier Collection” filter, it will say zero hotels are available.

I imagine that the average person will see 0 hotels in Nice (with the Premier Collection filter on) and move on to some other task, assuming that there are no qualifying hotels. However, if you leave the search to run for long enough, it will eventually populate a result for a Premier Collection property nearby in Cannes.

That’s nice, but it’s not quite in Nice. Still, I found the same pattern repeated with many other cities. You just have to be patient and let the search tool do its thing and you may find properties that you didn’t expect.

Video demonstration

If you’re having difficulty visualizing everything above, I made a quick video to demonstrate the problem and the solution here (it’s just over a minute long):

Bottom line

Capital One’s Premier Collection is an Amex Fine Hotels & Resorts competitor in terms of substance, but in terms of a search tool, it leaves a lot to be desired. While on the one hand, I can appreciate fast initial results and I can understand why someone might think that to be preferable to just waiting 10 or 15 seconds to get paginated results, the irony is that this slow-loading-results system is different than the way that most hotel search tools work and therefore I think it’s really easy to miss hotels that would otherwise be available. That problem gets compounded by the fact that the “Premium Stays” tab suggests that there are no Premier Collection properties in many cities that do actually have them. I have no idea whether Capital One will bring back something like this $200 off coupon, but if they do, hopefully this will help you find good uses before the next promotion gets pulled.

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