Rapid Travel Chai

Here I go again with US Bank. I was recently approved for both personal and business versions of their Korean Air credit cards. Yay, 30,000 miles each!

I applied using my Korean Air SkyPass number, first statements closed, and I wondered where my miles were. No, it was not delayed posting by US Bank. These miles were on the statement and confirmed sent to SkyPass.

I went to the SkyPass website Dashboard and noticed something: SKYPASS Number: ############ ( Old SKYPASS number : BA########).

I then found this notice from March 23, 2015:

Korean Air is changing the SKYPASS membership numbering system as of April 1, 2015, in order to facilitate our members’ use of automated devices and our partner companies’ services.

Your new membership number will be a 12-digit number, such as 1234 5678 9012.

(Existing membership numbers have 2 letters and 7-8 digits, such as BK12345678.)

I called up US Bank first for my personal account. I got a testy agent who updated my number and insisted the prior points would magically, retroactively be credited. When he started with, “Sir, I do this all the time,” I knew that call was done. Over on the business line the agent similarly had no idea what to do and proactively got a supervisor…who came back with the same story. When I persisted about the points from the prior statement she said, “yes, those points were already transferred to your SkyPass account ending ###.” Huh? What is that account?

Then unspooled the story that since I applied with my old BA-prefix number, US Bank had auto-assigned a new SkyPass account, never telling me about this new account, though it is displayed without title on the back of the card. (Trivia: last year the issue was the US Bank website was programmed to only accept BA-prefix numbers so people with the new 12-digit format for a time when the same 30k bonus was promoted could not apply: the application errored out.)

In typical US Bank fashion, everyone from customer to co-brand partner is at fault and the most US Bank would do is offer me Korean Air’s phone number. Fortunately, Korean Air has good customer service. I called them up. I need to email to engskypass -at- koreanair.com my ID scan, the account numbers and which to keep and they said the accounts will be merged in 1-3 days. They are familiar with US Bank problems, too.

For a sampling of US Bank fun, see my FlexPerks transfer issues, my (now successful!) quest to get the Club Carlson anniversary certificates, and today I am dealing with the Club Carlson global eCert erroring out on every search issue.