My Priceline Express Deal Purchases have all posted at 5x points, my Priceline non-express deal purchases are only 2x, which I believe is how the card is supposed to work.
My manual redemption hasn’t been processed though, calling on that.
Update: Regular priceline.com (non-express deal purchase) posting on 12-31-2019 shows a “top pick” icon when going to redeem points and offers the 1.5cpp redemption value. Perhaps this improved redemption rate has been fixed going forward?
Thanks for the update CM:
My PL purchases aged out recently, but before they did, I didn’t see them convert back to 1.5cpp…
Anyone else have any data points on this?
I have the legacy card. I just looked at my redemption options and points applied to priceline purchases are redeeming at the 1.5x point level. This card is great.
So with the Coronavirus wreaking havoc on travel… any thoughts on how to use Priceline Rewards Visa points? Any worry that Barclays may devalue what we have, and/or start to limit some of the earnings opportunities with this card?
I just had to file a dispute for a non-refundable hotel on this card. Expedia is the travel agency - the hotel in question is closed and thus can’t honor the reservation, but isn’t refunding the money. Expedia claims to be the middle man and thus can’t do anything.
Barclays process for this is stuck in the 1990s. I had to send a fax to initiate this request and I have heard that they are rather consumer-unfriendly when it comes to settling these. I suppose we’ll see.
Thanks for the update. My own cancellations are taking forever to get refunded from Expedia and Travelocity. They have sort of disclaimers that they are swamped with requests and refunds are taking time but that sounds like giving people the run around instead of telling them that they cannot do anything about it.
This is what they sent to me:
“We are sorry to know that your travel plans were affected by the current global health situation. We understand that you wanted to cancel your entire hotel stay and obtain a full refund. We value your request and from the date it was escalated to our department, we did not stop on monitoring your record and requesting a refund with the property because we truly understand your situation why you need to interrupt your trip plans. We have received their response today and we are sorry to inform you that they were unable to approve our refund request. Please be advised that we sell and advertise products with our partners, but we do not have a way to override their policy. The hotel collected the payment and any refund request is subject to their approval.”
So the interesting thing here is that the hotelier is unable to honor the reservation - they are closed. But Expedia paints this as though I want to cancel my reservation.
In reading up about this online, I am a little worried that if I win the chargeback, Expedia may attempt to sell the debt to a collector rather than go after their hotel partner. Apparently they regularly do this with chargebacks.
They sure make it sound like you decided to cancel unilaterally.
If hotel was closed at time of travel and thus couldn’t perform the services it contractually agreed to provide in exchange for consideration, that should be pretty easy charge-back investigation.
Was the reservation for a date in the past or future? If you want to cancel a future date, it’d be trickier since the hotel could technically re-open at any time (if allowed to). But once the date is passed and they were closed on that date, should be a slam dunk.
It is a future date. But Spain’s government has ordered all hotels to close until at least May 11 (and, likely through the end of the year from what I’ve heard, but that’s not yet confirmed). My reservation is from May 7 - May 10. I provided a news article from Bloomberg to this effect with the chargeback request.
I’ve also now sent mail to the hotel asking why they refused to refund. If they relent, I will just go back to Expedia and request a refund and hopefully withdraw the chargeback request. That is my preferred outcome here.
I think that may be why the hotel is reluctant to issue a refund. They may hold out until the date has passed in case the Spanish government somehow reopened things early. Kinda not wanting to lock in losses for them. But once the first day of your stay is there and the hotel is closed, I don’t see a valid reason for anyone to not approve the refund.
Agree with Shandril. While the delays are aggravating, this should resolve into a slam dunk claim for you, sullim4.
You’d asked above about how to use this card given the halt on travel. In my own case, I’ve had more travel to redeem against than points for redeeming for some time–so no surplus points. I can redeem against all those for another 30-60 days. After that point, I’ll plan on accumulating points until I book more priceline or flights.
Thanks guys. I agree that the case should be an easy one in my favor… the thing that worries me is Barclays is notorious for incompetence in handling these claims. I’ve also heard that Expedia will send debt collectors after customers that charge back non-refundable reservations, even in cases where the merchant fails to deliver the service. I am going to go ahead with the chargeback, but it nevertheless makes me a bit nervous about what might happen.
Incidentally, this hotel should be ashamed of themselves. Even now, directly from their website, they are only taking non-refundable reservations for all of their available dates. Who in their right mind is going to make a nonrefundable reservation at this point? They’ve also jacked up the price of the rooms, so that the vouchers they are issuing won’t cover the full amount. Businesses like this deserve to go under.
I booked a flight last week and redeemed it for a statement credit for the 1.5x travel bonus.
Now the airline cancelled the departing flight. Looks like a refund is imminent. Will Barclay go after my redeemed credit in this case? I guess that would be a fair treatment.
I had this situation occur. It was for some seat fees on a British Airways flight that I had booked back in October (for a flight in May that was subsequently cancelled in April).
Barclays did not do a clawback of the redemption.
I had a similar thing happen with Capital One Venture. I used points to reimburse the cost of some flights purchased in December. When these got cancelled by the airline, they did not reinstate the points, they just gave me the credit normally.
I’m assuming a lot of credit card companies are lenient on this for a few reasons. They have a lot of calls and cases as it is not to add disputes from customers over reward programs. It’d be a hassle to reconcile which transaction the points were used for and how the redemption processed, to undo the whole thing perfectly. And it’d be very bad PR for them to crack down on customers during this crisis.
Thank you both for the feedback! With many fewer trips planned, I have been concerned about accumulating too many points with no easy way for redemption.
I’ve had this experience several times, and have never had a clawback.
Interesting new perk for frequent Priceline users:
Any trips after 5/31/19 count, and it is not reset after each year. I’ve got 21 trips logged, which gets the same “gold” status afforded to any cardholder. At that status, I’ve received some excellent car rental and hotel prices in the past few months.
Looking forward to getting 25 trips in for top-tier status, = more hotel discount eligibility and more valuable coupons.
Happened again for me. Regular priceline purchase (was listed as some VIP deal, not express deal) at the Four Seasons posted and allowed 1.5 cpp redemption rate. There was no special icon next to it.
The special icon no longer appears very often for me even if the purchase is a 1.5 + 10% redemption option.
So, what I imagine is happening on these non-express deals with Priceline is through one of its divisions (kayak, booking.com, agoda, priceline, etc.) is that it is allowed to offer non opaque-deals (usually at least a login required as VIP indicates). Typically, there is no difference in the actual inventory from the hotel, but priceline can market the same inventory in so many ways. Just as long as priceline is the vendor, you likely will get the redemption deal. Did you also get the higher priceline.com earn rate (usually 5x)?