I’m currently on a roll of plans not going as I wanted them to go. You can read about it: for the first one, my price match purchase and the second one about my new credit card.
Today, I wanted to talk about the Chase Rewards Mall, formerly known as the Chase Ultimate Rewards Mall and how I planned to receive extra points through booking a hotel room using Hotels.com.
About two weeks ago, I posted that Chase makes me nervous in terms of how they wanted to review my purchase. All the other times that I called them, the first line customer service representative would review my statements and post the points. Fueling my paranoia, I thought I was at risk for Adverse Action since none of my statements closed and bonus points posting into my account. I realized after the fact, that it had to do with changing the statement close dates.
So it turns out that Chase will not pay out indiscriminately for click throughs to the online portal. I am not sure if it is due to Hotels.com/any reservations that are made, but in the past I have never had to mail in or email a receipt.
So they knew I clicked through the portal and they wanted proof I actually made the stay. The first secure message I sent to Chase, they denied my claim because I was too early. After the date they sent me, I sent in the receipt again and they posted the points into my account.
I made two reservations, one earlier than the other. On my second reservation, I used my Ink Bold and booked through the Chase portal again. Not realizing it was going to be an issue, I used one of the personal click throughs to Hotels.com
When I told Chase the points did not post, they sent me this letter:
Therefore, don’t do what I did and plan to get your points paid out if you use the click through from the personal side. If you read this and think as an enterprising individual that you could click through Chase, but use a different portal and pay with the Chase card for 2 portal pay outs. I highly discourage that thought. It is definitely fraudulent. In addition, the portals and credit cards do see transaction numbers and when things are researched it will not be pretty.
See here:
Early 2014, I posted a screenshot from one of my gift card churns and used Discover portal + Discover and Discover + UPromise. While this only displays Discover, I am confident that Chase and any other credit card operator with a portal knows your order numbers. That being said, when they reconcile your transaction number with their portal operator and they see a discrepancy in pay outs, only bad things are going to happen.
