Beware When Making Reservations Online

[Divadad]

When making reservations online, check to be sure that the points from the correct "pot" are subtracted from your account. I recently made a reservation where some of the points where taken from a "pot" of points not expiring for a year and a half, leaving points that permanently expire in 4 months. When I called about this I was told "our computeer system does that sometimes and we're working on it." Very convenient for a large corporation to not fix a computer glitch that probably saves them millions of dollars a year in expired points. This errodes my trust in a system in which I have a significant investment. Check your transactions!

 

[StevenTing]

I avoid this issue by making sure I use all of my points for the current year and that way I'm only borrowing points from the next year. I'm always a year ahead when I'm using points.

 

[dgf15215]

Quite to the contrary, when my wife was booking next year's visits the agent (Heather) pointed out that some points that had been refunded to us had an earlier expiration date than we realized and moved things around so that those points were used first. Three or four different trips were booked on that phone call and Heather proved to be a real champ in making things work for us. So I don't buy the idea that this is purposeful but I also don't believe that a well constructed computer model would not include algorithms that would always use the oldest points first - hell, any accounting system on the market that I've used always wants to apply payments to the oldest invoice first. Not rocket science.

 

[Divadad]

I agree that the consultants on the phone are courteous and helpful. I had been assured however by a consultant that the computer system would always take the oldest points first and this did not happen. It doesn't really matter whether this is purposeful or not, as you said this should not be rocket science to fix.