With the busy holiday season and year ending, I seem to have lost track of some expiring free-night certificates. My heart dropped when I saw that I had let a Marriott category 1-5 certificate expire literally 2 days ago!
In the past, I’ve heard that sometimes a loyalty program will offer a courtesy extension on certificates that were soon to be expired, but since mine had already expired, I was almost certain I’d be SOL.
Still, I hopped on the phone and after a 4-minute phone call, the wonderful agent re-instated my certificate to last for a whole year from today (super generous!).
Classic example of “the answer is always no if you don’t ask the question”.
Have you had any positive [or negative] experiences when it came to asking for an extension on an expiring/expired certificate?
P.S. – United has always been generous about accepting expired drink vouchers in flight and extending expiring upgrade certificates.
I likewise have had good feedback from Marriott. Certificate was expiring and I wanted to stay at one of their hotels a month AFTER said expiration. They said to just make the reservation and they would apply the certificate. Made for a happy Marriott customer. I have am low-level elite with Marriott, only by virtue of credit card.
Was this a Megabonus cert or a Marriott Visa cert?
Andy, it was a category 1-5 mega bonus cert
Hyatt was completely jerky about reinstating my (one day) expired night. There was also no availability at a hotel I wanted for a cert that had about a week left on it and I was SOL there too. I find Hyatt CS to generally be very good. Definitely failing in this area.
I called last week and there computer systems were down! So they couldn’t do anything.
Hyatt was nice enough to extend my Hyatt 2 FREE night certificate one month until the end of January (though I begged for a 6 month extension). We spent the 2 nights at the Park Hyatt Vendome, and learned that we love to travel in the winter. The moral of this story, though, is to consider time frames when applying for a credit card with Hyatt, since it’s unlikely that they’ll accomodate requests for lengthyextensions.
We got lucky with Hyatt and they were able to extend the 2 free night awards from the credit card. This policy ended as of September (or August) apparently, but since they have record of the call and made notations to my account, we were saved!! Made me a lifelong Hyatt customer…