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4th Night Free Reservations Can Be Unintentionally Cancelled if the Hotel is Closing Due to COVID-19
For those that made “4th night free” reservations with their Citi Prestige cards before
the switch over from Aspire Lifestyles (where you could book any rate and receive elite perks) to the new system (where you can only book what the website shows and not get any elite treatment or points), I think it’s pretty well known that you can keep extending your reservations.
Originally it seemed this would only be through 2020, but, for now, it seems you may be able to extend them with a date change for quite a bit into the future. At any point this could change (if Citi decides to stop letting the concierges do it) but for now that’s the deal.
One catch:
While you can change them an unlimited amount of times, there is one important criteria. The confirmation number you originally had cannot ever change. If the reservation is cancelled for any reason, the 4th night free is gone forever since you can’t make any new concierge bookings. Date changes are almost always fine; room type changes are generally fine (with some exceptions based on the in-hotel computer system).
COVID-19 and Hotel Closures
I had a reservation for Memorial Day weekend. I’ve been meaning to call to move it to later in the year and planned to do it tomorrow. Yet I got caught off guard with an email today saying that my reservation was cancelled because the hotel has closed for the time being.
The email came from Aspire (Citi’s travel concierge) and included my confirmation and cancellation numbers.
The hotel has cancelled your booking (confirmation xxxxxxx | cancellation: xxxxxxx). If you’d like to rebook this stay please reach out to Thank You
I immediately phoned up the concierge and had a very pleasant chat with the agent, who absolutely understood my panic and called the hotel to see what they could do. She couldn’t reach a manager and opened a case for me asking them to reinstate the reservation and then move it.
If this happens, it’s out of your hands…
They may be able to reinstate the same reservation – or they may not – depending on the individual hotel’s computer system. I’m sure if they can do it, they will. But she let me know that, unfortunately, if they can’t reinstate that same reservation number, I’ll be out of luck. There’s no way for them to get a new reservation into their system and no way to escalate it.
I’ll hear back soon and if I lose it, I lose it. But since you may be in a similar situation, I wanted to give you the heads up to proactively call in and move your reservation sooner than later. Remember you can push the reservation out a full year if you don’t know when you’ll reschedule to. That will preserve the 4th night free booking and you can pick yur confirmed dates when you are ready.
Has this happened to you?
Let me know here, on Twitter, or in the private MilesTalk Facebook group.
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