Chase Ultimate Rewards Cuts Ties With All Things Disney
A few months ago Disney Hotels had fallen off of the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal, but you were still able to book Disney hotels, Disney Cruises, and purchase park tickets by calling the Chase travel center. Unfortunately that all ended on Friday per reports.
Say What? No More Disney 🙁
Disney is insanely expensive and difficult to discount. The Chase Sapphire Reserve card provided you a way to defray some of that cost by paying with points. Having the CSR allowed you to book Disney park tickets, hotel rooms, and cruises at a value of 1.5 cents per point. As of Friday Joe Cheung is reporting that you can no longer book these with Chase Ultimate Rewards even when calling into agents.
This could be happening because of Chase changing over from Connexions to Expedia, but I am not so sure. It is important to note that Chase is the one who stopped this not Connexions or Disney itself. According to Joe, Connexions is still able to book Disney products with ThankYou points.
I also checked the Chase Freedom portal, which is currently run by Expedia, and no Disney resorts are showing up there either.
UPDATE: Shawn is reporting that they are appearing in his portal (in October but not next year) but they still don’t in mine even after trying 5 different dates. Gives us a little hope for the future though.
Another Chase Devaluation?
It is still too soon to say if this is a change or just a temporary issue because of the portal change over. I would think that these bookings would remain open until the last day of the change, so that makes me think this is a Chase devaluation.
Pair that with Chase adding the 48 month rule, closing the double application loophole, removing authorized user bonuses, and I think Chase is just cutting more costs. That is 100% my theory and we won’t know for sure until the Sapphire Ultimate Rewards portal changes over to Expedia. But it doesn’t look good to me. Chase seems to be trimming costs wherever they can, despite the fact that they are making hefty profits.
Conclusion
This is big news and a hit to the value of the Ultimate Rewards ecosystem. I know a lot of people used their UR points to book Disney vacations since it is hard to discount Disney vacations otherwise.
I think this was a costly redemption for Chase since they had to pay the full 1.5 cents per point freight versus reduced costs for purchasing airline miles. If costs were indeed the reason for this shutdown, we’ll know soon enough.
H/T – MilestotheMagic
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It would be ironic for Chase to cut Disney from the travel portal considering chase issues the Disney credit card.
Good point Dan – I am sure that has to play a factor. Hopefully it comes back after Expedia takes over.
The disney resorts are actually still showing in the chase freedom portal.
I just updated since Shawn said he saw this in his portal for October but not for next year. I tried 5 different dates throughout the next 12 months and came up with nothing. Not sure what is going on there.
Oh, how strange! I was looking all within this calendar year.