Frequent Miler on the Air - Chase Travel℠ / The Edit: Best Rate Guarantee | Coffee Break Ep110 | 6-16-26

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

Chase has been slowly rolling out a Best Rate Guarantee for Chase Sapphire Reserve® cardholders who book hotels through Chase Travel℠. We'll talk about what that means in today's episode. (00:51) - Chase Sapphire Reserve® Background(03:07) - The basics of the Best Rate Guarantee(07:25) - Nick's experienceVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn HeadsMentioned in this episode:Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast NetworkFrequent Miler Beginner's Guidehttps://frequentmiler.com/start-here/

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyescape.com. Today's coffee break. Chase Travel, the edit, best rate guarantee. Welcome to Frequent Milers Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. Each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less or your money back. Chase has been slowly rolling out a best rate guarantee for Safari Reserve cardholders who book hotels through Chase Travel. And we're going to talk about why that's important and details of this best rate guarantee, how to do it. And ultimately also, we're going to talk about Nick's experience actually filing a best rate guarantee. So first, before we get into the best rate guarantee part, I think we should talk about why it's important. Okay, to get why a best rate guarantee is important, you need to understand the Sapphire Reserve card.

There's a personal and business card. Both of them costs $795 per year, but they have a slew of coupons that help make up for that annual fee. one of the coupons is for the edit and the way this works the edit is a luxury hotel collection sort of like amex's fine hotels and resorts and the way the $250 coupon works is twice per year you can get if you book the edit you can get $250 back on your prepaid booking in order to get that, though. The booking must be for at least two nights, and it must be prepaid. So that's all cool, I guess, except we've been kind of very underwhelmed by these coupons because the edit has a much more limited selection than find hotels and resorts. So you're trying to find a good hotel

where you're traveling. Good luck finding one on the edit. Now, if you, if you, do find one, you'll see it has similar perks to find hotels and resorts like free breakfast for $200 property credit, room upgrade, things like that. And sometimes you can give very good point value if you want to redeem points for the edit because the edit hotels are points boosted up to two cents per point. But sometimes boosts are really low, like 1.15 kind of range. So you have to be careful about that before you spend your points on it. But the biggest disappointment with the edit is probably the fact that prices are usually much higher than elsewhere. So, you know, the times where I've been looking and I'm like, yes, I finally found a hotel that I want to

stay at for two nights or more. And, you know, it's on the edit. And, you know, oh, boy, this is great, except that the price is maybe $300 more. than what I'd spend elsewhere. And so the $250 back is not helpful. But Chase is now out with this best rate guarantee that makes it a little bit better for those who can take advantage. So there is now a best rate guarantee for some folks. So this is targeted if you're a Sapphire Reserve consumer card holder. So for instance, in my household, my wife has the best rate guarantee available on her Sapphire Reserve card,

but I don't have it available on my Sapphire Reserve card. However, it does seem to be available to all Sapphire Reserve business card holders. So if you've got a Sapphire Reserve for business card, then you should have access to the best rate guarantee. It's just consumer cardholders where it varies from person to person. So if you hear us talk about the rest of this and you log in and you don't see any of it, it's probably unfortunately just because you're not targeted for it yet. We hope that Chase intends to roll this out to everyone eventually. If you are targeted, when you go to the Chase Travel website, like the main search box there,

where you put it in like a city for a hotel or whatever it may be, right below that, there's a little banner that says price match guarantee. It's advertised right below the hotel search box there. And so you should see that if you're eligible for it. Also, after making a reservation, if you go into my trips and you click on the trip that you just booked and you are somebody who's targeted to be able to make a claim, you'll see like a little box with a button to submit a best rate guarantee claim. And again, I went through that whole process. Even though I didn't see the advertisement in my account, I still went ahead and made a booking

and then went into my trips and didn't see the button. This actually happened because I saw Dan Steals post about doing this. And I was like, oh, that's a perfect fit for my trip. And I went through and made the booking. And I just didn't have the box that he had mentioned in order to file a best rate guarantee claim and that's when I did a little more research and found, oh, it's targeted. Only some people have it. So I was glad to see my wife had it. She had that button to submit a best rate guarantee claim. The things you need to know about the Chase Travel Best Rate Guarantee are first, you must submit it within 24 hours of making your original booking. So this is not something you can file if you find a best price weeks later. Ideally, you're going to want to be prepared

like right away to make a best price guarantee claim. And all of the usual best rate guarantee stuff, applies here. Like it's got to be the same property, of course, dates, room type. So if they have different descriptions, you may or may not be able to get that approved. They have to have the same refund policy, the same guest count. And it has to be a publicly available rate. If it's the kind of rate where you have to like log in to see the pricing, they're not going to match that. So it has to be a publicly available rate of some sort. But if you do find a better rate, And as Greg kind of insinuated before, that's not so hard. I've got a lot of properties on the edit.

You can easily find a better rate even just by going directly to the hotel website. There's plenty of opportunities to do that. Then you may be able to file a best rate guarantee claim. Yeah. One quick question for you, Nick. Some people thought that best rate guarantees wouldn't work with the edit hotels because those bookings include things like free breakfast and $100. of property credit, which when you book elsewhere wouldn't be included necessarily. And so it would

look like it's a different booking. Is that true? Are we blocked out of those? That's not true. And that's what's really shocking and surprising here, that among all of those things I just mentioned that have to match up, it doesn't mention that the inclusions need to match up. So the included bonuses is not one of those things that has to match. And that's what actually drew me to this. When I saw the Dan Steele's post that it worked on in edit book, I would never have expected it to work on a booking from the edit without having seen his experience doing it. And I said, oh, wow, I can match to the price elsewhere. Even though that price didn't include breakfast for two and the $100 credit, that's awesome,

because that makes it much more useful. So yeah, that's really important. I'm glad you asked about that. You can still match just to the price they're selling the room only for and get the edit benefits as well. That's awesome. All right. We'll be right back with my real world best rate guarantee experience after this.

Jamie writes in, love the show, but I have no idea what you're talking about. Please help. That's true. Well, this can be confusing. And luckily for you, Jamie, we have a beginner's guide that can help. You want to go to frequentmiler.com slash start here to check out our full beginner's guide. And we're back. I'm eager to learn about next actual real-world experience with this best rate guarantee. Yeah. So when I saw the post from Dave, Dan Steeles, I immediately thought of a reservation that I had been looking about and thinking about making. So I have a two-night stay coming up in Nashville, and so we decided we'd stay at the Virgin Hotel Nashville, because it was reasonably good through Chase Travel, and because that is one of the brands that

triggers not only the edit credit, but also an additional $250 credit that's available for 2026 only at this point for select brands like IHG and there's a couple others virgin as one of them. So you can actually stack and get both the $250 edit credit and that $250 select brand's credit to get $500 back on the booking. And it was points boosted. So I said, oh, you know what? Let me go do that because if I can do a best rate guarantee, I bet I can find a better price than whatever Chase travel has.

And so I went through initially doing it in my account and then doing it through my wife's account, but I ran into something really weird where I ran the search on my wife's account because I knew she had the best rate guarantee after I struck out doing it on my own because I didn't have access to it. I went to her account and I searched in Nashville and when I did the search, when I ran the search, same search that I had done on my own account a little while before that. Only one hotel in Nashville came up under the edit, just the Thompson, Nashville. And I knew that wasn't right because I had been searching for the last week or two and I'd looked a bunch of different edit properties in Nashville.

So I thought it was weird. So I ran the search again and still only the Thompson came up. And that was a little odd to me. So there was a button to filter. And so I clicked that button to filter. And one of the options was to filter by hotel name. And when I started typing in Virgin, it populated the name, Virgin Hotel Nashville. And so I clicked on it.

And okay, great. After I clicked on it, it did show up now. But it said this rate is not available. And again, this is on Chase Travel. This has nothing to do with the best rate guarantee. T yet, but the hotel looked like it wasn't available. But I knew that wasn't true. I had just booked it a few minutes before. So I knew it wasn't unavailable. So I clicked on the hotel and the search result, even though it said this rate isn't available. And sure enough, multiple room types

were available to buy. I got no idea what's up with that. But the same thing happened again later when I went to make another reservation on my own account. Same exact thing in Nashville, same hotels, came up with just the Thompson only in my account, the same way it did in my wife's. And again, put the hotel name in, came up again, no rates available, clicked on the hotel anyway, and sure enough, rates were available. Yeah. That was weird. I've had weird stuff like that happened before.

I don't know that I've ever gotten to, you know, clicking through a hotel that says it's unavailable and finding actual room. So that's great. I mean, it's good to know that we should try that. I've had the exact opposite happen where a hotel I was looking at was widely available, like basroom types were available everywhere. but through the edit, when I clicked on it, the only room type was like the top level suite for thousands of dollars.

And it's like, come on. So I don't know what the, you know, I'll have to wait for you to tell me the trick to find the other room types that should be available that aren't showing. Well, I don't know that part, but I do know that I thought that was interesting because, you know, you mentioned at the beginning of the show that we've been kind of underwhelmed by the edit in general because, you know, if you're looking for a hotel somewhere, good luck finding one wherever you're going.

And this experience made me wonder, have I missed edit properties in other places? Is it like glitched out and just not shown me places that A, were under the edit and B were available for my dates? So, I mean, I don't know. I just, I would have no way of knowing that. So it just happened in this case. I had run enough searches in the last couple of weeks to know that it wasn't correct when I only saw one property.

So I don't know. There's no solution there. It's just worth being aware and maybe checking, trying, you know, a lot of properties that are available through fine hotels and resorts or builds home away from home or virtuoso or also available through the edit. That's not universally true by any stretch. But if you have a particular one, you've got your eye on, maybe try searching by name just to make sure that it's not actually under the adity or whatever. All right. But okay, that out of the way, that was just some weird glitchy thing, hopefully, but a glitchy thing that repeated. But let's talk

about the best rate guarantee process. So what we were looking to book, we needed more than one room, but the first room that we did this whole process with, I was booking two adults and two kids in one room. So I needed a room with two queen beds. And the price through Chase travel was $1,011 and change. And I knew that was a little high. I went to Google hotels and searched and lots of other sites had it a little bit cheaper, one of which was the Virgin Hotel's website directly. And so when I went directly to the Virgin Hotel's website, I actually realized what was happening here is Chase was pricing it as though it was four adults in the room, even though I put in the kids' ages in the search.

It was giving me the price that Virgin would have charged directly if I put four adults in that room. Interesting. But when I went to the Virgin, and again, I had to put it in the ages of my kids on Chase travel. So they knew they were kids. They knew the ages. But they clearly didn't link that up with the hotel booking system. Because when you go directly to the hotel website, if they were kids, the hotel was cheaper. for the the four-person room.

So it came up 895 with two adults and two kids directly through Virgin hotels. So I booked through Chase Travel. Now, this requires a little bit of mental math because, as Dan's deals pointed out, well, first of all, I wanted to put $500 on my card. I wanted to pay $500 with a Sapphire Reserve card in order to trigger those $250 credits, the edit credit and the additional hotels credit. So I wanted to charge at least $500 to my Sapphire Reserve. and then I was going to use ultimate rewards points to pay the balance because this was a points boosted property.

So I'd get decent value for my points. And it was points boosted to 2.0 or? No, it was 1.65, but I don't want to get too lost in the weeds in terms of them into math here. And that's not fantastic, but it's also probably better than what Hyatt is going to offer on average moving forward. So I don't feel so bad about using them at 1.65 if I'm getting a true 1.65. and the key with that, of course, is getting the right price for the hotel. So if I'm getting the best rate guarantee, then it makes sense to me to maybe use it 1.65. So anyway, so I wanted to charge at least $500 to the Sapphire Reserve card,

but the difference in price was a little more than $100. And so when I filed the claim, I was hoping to get the $100 back. And Dan Steele's pointed out that if I charge just $500 to the card, they would claw back the credit, like the statement credit money, essentially. I would lose out on 100 of my 500, basically. So I had to do the math in order to pay X amount with points and leave about $600 on my card. So after they approved the claim, they take that 100 back, plus I'd still get my 500 in statement

credits. That step is a bit of a pain because you do need to best out the calculator, especially with these like 1.65 cent value places to figure out, okay, so once I take out the $600, how much is going to go on the card and how many points per dollar is in? So there's a little bit of extra math to be done there. But that's what I did. And so I put about $600 a little more than that on the Sapphire Reserve card. They paid the rest in points.

And then as soon as I confirmed the reservation through Chase Travel, it went in and clicked the button to file the best rate guarantee claim. I submitted a screenshot of the Virgin Hotel's website, showing the rate, showing the cancellation policy, showing the number of people in the room. So it said two adults and two children. I wanted to get as much information in there. as possible, which meant very tiny print. I had to zoom way out to get everything in one shot. But I did that, and it was, again, pretty intuitive in terms of the information you have to

provide, the URL. You have to give the URL the hotel website here. And it only took a couple of hours. It was like maybe three or four hours on a Sunday. I was pretty impressed with the turnaround time that an email came back. And the email said, congratulations, we've approved your claim. And that was good news. But there was a bit of an asterisk there. They said that they approved it as a one-time courtesy because they said that the payment terms were not identical. While the cancellation policy was the same, booking through the Virgin Hotel's website directly, it would be paid at the hotel. So the rate would not be prepaid because this was not an advance purchase rate. It was a fully flexible rate. So essentially they said, because I was comparing

against a rate paid at the hotel, ordinarily, they wouldn't have approved that as a best rate guarantee because, of course, my Chase travel booking was prepaid so I could get the edit credit. And so the takeaway there is that if you're going to file one of these best rate guarantee claims, I guess you're going to need to find something. I don't know how often they'll do those exceptions. But exceptions aside, I guess you'll need to find a website where you prepay. And I prefer to compare flexible. I don't want to do advanced purchase. So you're going to have to find a site with a flexible cancellation policy where you prepay the booking. But that's usually possible. like Hotels.com and Priceline and Expedia and stuff like that. So I should have just compared

against one of those, I suppose, because I actually should have gotten about $115 or $116. And they only gave me $100 back. So they shorted me a little bit on my best rate guarantee claim, I guess, because they were making a one-time exception. I won't complain too much about that, though, because it's very close now to what I would have paid booking directly. I still get the 1.65 cents and the points that I use. So I used about, I don't know, 23,000 points, I think, out of pocket for two nights with the breakfast for two and the $100 credit. So that worked out reasonably well overall. And again, I was really impressed with the turnaround time.

Like I said, four hours or so on a Sunday. I didn't expect that. Yeah. So that's really great news overall. So you're saying after you book your hotel through the edit, you said, I think you said you go back into Chase Travel and click on your. Reservation somehow. You go to trips.

Yeah. And the button is just there, right? It's just there. Sounds like it's an easy process to file. Super easy. All you have to do is, yeah, you just put in the name of the hotel, the dates, the room type, and then attach to the screenshot. There was nothing that I had to type other than the name of the hotel, I guess.

There was no manual entry. I didn't have to explain it or anything. You have to give the URL. So in this case, it was like version hotels, Nashville.com or something like that. They just want the base URL of the website. where you're comparing against and they make you confirm the room type and the number of people in the room. But again, it's pretty basic.

It takes just a couple seconds. There'll be screenshots in the post that will probably be published by the time this coffee break is out. So you can see exactly what it looked like. But yeah, it was super intuitive. Once I pulled up the trip, it was a pretty big button right underneath the booking that said price match guarantees submit a claim here. That's great.

Do you know, are there any limitations on what sites they will match to? like, you know, so Charlie's cheap hotels or something, can you submit that? Not that that's a real thing, but I, yeah, right. No, I did not see any limitations. Now, anytime we've seen these best rate guarantee options, I think different sites have always kind of been excluded, but I think it's probably worth always trying. I think especially anything like this where it's a human who's going to review it, you might as well submit and try even if you thought it was going to.

be excluded for some reason. So one thing to be careful about when I was looking at the edit hotels just the other day, I ran into at least one where there was no option for a refundable booking. It was all non-refundable. Now, I think most of the ones I come across are fully refundable up to some date. But, you know, I wouldn't want to mess with the hopes of getting a, the best rate guarantee to go through on a non-refundable one. Yeah, and actually on that note, maybe it's worth mentioning that the cancellation policy is

matched in my case, but they were worded differently such that I thought the issue was going to be an agent pushing back on the cancellation policy because Chase said you cancel for free up until the day before at 1159 p.m. or something of that sort. And the Virgin Hotel's website said cancellations within 24 hours of arrival in Kuro one day, penalty. They were effectively the same thing, but it was just, it wasn't clear that it was free before that. So I thought for sure that they might push back on that.

I was very glad to see that they didn't, that they recognized that that matched. So that was good news because whoever's processing these, you know, was able to understand that, which might seem intuitive to you and I, but I feel like probably wouldn't be intuitive to somebody who doesn't regularly do this stuff. So I was, I was pleased with that and pleased with the speed of the turnaround time, least with the ultimate result, but do be aware that they apparently are going to want to see it compare it against a prepaid rate if you're prepaying through Chase. Yeah, really good to know. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed

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