Can I get my 173,116 Chase Ultimate Rewards points refunded?

Ben Neumann’s hard-earned family vacation ended with him angry and disappointed — so disappointed that he wants his 173,116 Chase Ultimate Rewards points refunded.

Is that allowed? No it isn’t — but when has that ever stopped our advocacy team from trying?

Warning: If you’re a rules-are-rules kind of reader, you probably will hate this case. But when I heard from Neumann, I wanted to help him immediately. He put his faith in his credit card rewards during a trying time in his life and ran afoul of program and airline rules that cost him thousands of dollars when he could least afford it.

I had to do something for him.

We’ve had a moratorium on credit card reward cases for years, but Neumann’s problem convinced me to lift it. So if you’ve been ripped off or hoodwinked by your credit card rewards, contact us. We’ll be happy to help if we can.

A COVID scare and a canceled flight

Neumann is a public education administrator. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Amanda, and their two-year-old son. They’ve been collecting Chase Sapphire points for years, hoping to take a vacation together. Finally, this spring, his family in New York offered to take their son so Neumann and his wife could have some time together. They decided to spend their points to fly from San Francisco to New York, drop off the boy, and then continue to Stockholm.

“Two days before our flight, we found out that the family members we stayed with tested positive for COVID,” says Neumann. “At the same time, our two-year-old son got extremely sick — 103.5 fever, constant vomiting — which we assumed was COVID. For very obvious reasons, we canceled our flight, both to ensure that we would not potentially infect countless travelers and airline employees, but also to take care of our son, who was very sick at that time.”

It turns out none of the Neumanns had COVID, so they could travel to Sweden after all. But by then, KLM had already canceled their flights. Neumann spent hours trying to rebook the tickets through Chase, without success.

“We figured that our vacation dreams were over, and we were both pretty depressed,” says Neumann. “We specifically used Chase Sapphire points to book this trip because we have no accessible money in our accounts to pay for a flight.”

But the Neumanns decided that this setback wouldn’t end their vacation. Even though they didn’t have the money, they decided to book new flights to Stockholm.They put the purchase on their Chase credit card and decided to pay it back over time, even though they would incur late fees and interest. Ironically, they were on the same flight they would have been on if they hadn’t canceled.

“I decided that what Chase did was completely wrong and would request our points refunded,” he says.

Chase: “We cannot honor your request”

When the Neumanns returned from Sweden, that’s exactly what they did.

Here’s the response from Chase:

We cannot honor your request for additional points

Dear Benjamin Neumann:

We are responding to your complaint about Chase travel booking for your credit card account. We appreciate the opportunity to assist you.

We reviewed your account and confirmed no bank errors occurred. We cannot honor your request for a refund. The booking was non-refundable; however, you received a travel credit that is valid until June 1, 2023.

We also reviewed the calls that took place and found no errors. The reservation was canceled on June 25, 2022. Unfortunately, we were not able to rebook the preferred flight for you.

The airlines control pricing and availability for new bookings and rebooking flights using travel credit. Flights listed online are for new bookings and will not always have the same availability as flights booked with travel credits.

We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.

Neumann says he’s unlikely to ever use a KLM flight credit.

A very special case for a Chase points refund

You’re probably wondering about the sense of urgency that made them rebook their flight so quickly. Why spend money they didn’t have? And why would they never be able to use KLM’s flight credit?

Neumann’s wife, Amanda, has Stage 4…