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A month ago the Chase IHG card made a surprise devaluation of the anniversary night., adding a cap the excluded many of the more desirable properties. The original announcement:
The seemingly arbitrary cutoff date meant many customers new to the card would not even get one uncapped night that was marketed to them when they signed up. While long-term cardholders like myself got an uncapped one in February, my wife would get a capped one in June.
The real surprise was that Chase and IHG appear to not have properly gauged the widespread and persistent negative response. Set aside social media, every call and message of complaint they receive costs them to have someone handle.
Within a few days of the announcement, there was a partial backpedal for cardmembers who signed up in 2018.
Then a month of silence.
Today comes word via IHG’s twitter account (spotted by IAD Gr8) that all upcoming certs issued before May 1, 2019 will get their anniversary cert as an uncapped one. That means my wife will get one in June for 2018 but her 2019 one will be capped, while, with a February date I get uncapped in 2018 and 2019. She still is getting shorted by one!
That’s right! IHG with Chase recently made the decision to award one more uncapped Anniversary Free Night to every IHG Rewards Club Select Cardholders. This means that their recently awarded or upcoming free night CAN be used at any IHG hotel worldwide. – Tracy https://t.co/2rT0l9N9Cu
— IHG Service (@IHGService) May 4, 2018
This was the simple and obvious solution and it is a surprise it took a month for the two companies to run the numbers and decide that honoring the certs is less costly than dealing with complaints and lost customers for the card and for IHG stays.
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Chase is a bank and I’m wondering if their lawyers started to get nervous about the idea of changing the terms of an offer that requires customers to make a payment (the credit card fee), then reneging on the things they promised in exchange in writing. In response to my private message they first passed the buck to IHG, insinuating that it was the hotel chain’s decision, not theirs. I then observed that loyalty programs can play fast and loose with devaluations, but banks are regulated by government agencies and not so likely to get away with making false promises.… Read more »
@Daves – I have not seen any case on the legality of changing benefits, only in changing the annual fee in the first year. Chase was brazen on this one, others like the United Explorer card dropping 10k bonis for $25k spend they have also done, and when you look at all the Platinum card changes Amex has made, it seems there is not much legally preventing them from these changes.
Thanks for the heads up! With 2 cards we can squeeze out one more IHG weekend in Manhattan if not somewhere more exotic.
Welp, my wife already torched her card. I was waiting till the fee hit and was going to demand that the af be waived or I was out too. Shame on them for waiting this long. When she called, if she thought there was any chance that Chase ang IHG would have done the right thing, she wouldn’t have cancelled. But the rep was very adamant that this was set in stone and a final decision. This isn’t solely a sock drawer card for me. I actually do stay at their hotels quite frequently and put a fair amount to… Read more »
@Chris: contact Chase, most typically they can re-open within 30 days and sometimes longer, and the phone logs they can review will show what they told your wife: