topic Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem in Credit Cards

Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 19:36:01 GMT

I have been paying some large vet bills lately (with mobile wallet) and I just checked the reward tracker on US Bank's site. To my surprise/horror/disgust I saw all my transactions since Jan 1 have been earning 1x. I chatted with an agent which said it won't show 3x till the statement closes, which wasn't quite my memory, but OK.

Then I realized that several of these transactions in early Jan were on a closed statement, so I called. I was told it is a known issue, and all mobile wallet transactions since Jan 1 are miscategorized and they are working hard to fix it. And she promised that I would get credit.

Still, a little concerned that if it takes a while, they might decide some things aren't wallet or whatever. I would also think this shouldn't be too hard to fix as presumably it is a very specific part of the code (Did someone put "If date < 20240101 then walletmultiplier=3 else walletmultiplier=1" !?)

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

SpaethCo — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 22:41:13 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:

Still, a little concerned that if it takes a while, they might decide some things aren't wallet or whatever. I would also think this shouldn't be too hard to fix as presumably it is a very specific part of the code (Did someone put "If date < 20240101 then walletmultiplier=3 else walletmultiplier=1" !?)

The rewards section of the portal that shows the earnings per transaction hasn't had its first birthday yet. I think part of the reason for the delay despite this card being around since 2017 is that the points aren't tallied in US Bank's system quite how you'd expect. Those 3x points are earned as 1x on the rounded dollar amount of the transaction, and then 2x of the rounded sum of all of the transactions with that same merchant on the same day when the bonus conditions apply (ie, MCC code of travel, originated via Device Account Number and not the card number).

As I understand it, there is a daily batch process that assigns 1x base points to all of the transactions, and then there are separate batch processes for the "awards" points which are grouped into different buckets. Years ago this only used to be run just before statement cut, but recently there have been some updates to run it more frequently and sum up the bonus points per merchant per day.

Based on my past experience with these kind of systems, most likely they had a batch process failure for a grouping of Device Account Numbers (DAN)s after the 1st of the year and now after re-running and re-scheduling that job that assigns the bonus points some accounts are running past a cutoff deadline and now the bonus points have a rolling different posting date from the base 1x point earning.

The portal has to do a lot of heavy lifting to "glue" these points back together to display the earned amount. For example, the system gets confused about how to divide out the bonus points bucket and allocate them to the base transactions when you have multiple transactions with the same merchant on the same day. I think the problem here is that if the bonus points and base points have different dates the portal won't be able to match them up at all.

When your statement cuts, however, they'll just reported the journaled total in each of the buckets on your statement. With the system setup this way your statement could be 93-100% correct (ie, it might be missing a day or two of crediting from the bonus batch) even while the portal can't figure out how to assemble the points back together into an accurate earning display.

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

GhostCredit — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 02:39:35 GMT

Is this just the Altitude Reserve or on all US Bank cards?

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

Curious_George2 — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 07:31:42 GMT

@SpaethCo wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:

Still, a little concerned that if it takes a while, they might decide some things aren't wallet or whatever. I would also think this shouldn't be too hard to fix as presumably it is a very specific part of the code (Did someone put "If date < 20240101 then walletmultiplier=3 else walletmultiplier=1" !?)
The rewards section of the portal that shows the earnings per transaction hasn't had its first birthday yet. I think part of the reason for the delay despite this card being around since 2017 is that the points aren't tallied in US Bank's system quite how you'd expect. Those 3x points are earned as 1x on the rounded dollar amount of the transaction, and then 2x of the rounded sum of all of the transactions with that same merchant on the same day when the bonus conditions apply (ie, MCC code of travel, originated via Device Account Number and not the card number).

As I understand it, there is a daily batch process that assigns 1x base points to all of the transactions, and then there are separate batch processes for the "awards" points which are grouped into different buckets. Years ago this only used to be run just before statement cut, but recently there have been some updates to run it more frequently and sum up the bonus points per merchant per day.

Based on my past experience with these kind of systems, most likely they had a batch process failure for a grouping of Device Account Numbers (DAN)s after the 1st of the year and now after re-running and re-scheduling that job that assigns the bonus points some accounts are running past a cutoff deadline and now the bonus points have a rolling different posting date from the base 1x point earning.

The portal has to do a lot of heavy lifting to "glue" these points back together to display the earned amount. For example, the system gets confused about how to divide out the bonus points bucket and allocate them to the base transactions when you have multiple transactions with the same merchant on the same day. I think the problem here is that if the bonus points and base points have different dates the portal won't be able to match them up at all.

When your statement cuts, however, they'll just reported the journaled total in each of the buckets on your statement. With the system setup this way your statement could be 93-100% correct (ie, it might be missing a day or two of crediting from the bonus batch) even while the portal can't figure out how to assemble the points back together into an accurate earning display.

This guy codes.

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

Ghoshida — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 20:57:26 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
I have been paying some large vet bills lately (with mobile wallet) and I just checked the reward tracker on US Bank's site. To my surprise/horror/disgust I saw all my transactions since Jan 1 have been earning 1x. I chatted with an agent which said it won't show 3x till the statement closes, which wasn't quite my memory, but OK.

Then I realized that several of these transactions in early Jan were on a closed statement, so I called. I was told it is a known issue, and all mobile wallet transactions since Jan 1 are miscategorized and they are working hard to fix it. And she promised that I would get credit.

Still, a little concerned that if it takes a while, they might decide some things aren't wallet or whatever. I would also think this shouldn't be too hard to fix as presumably it is a very specific part of the code (Did someone put "If date < 20240101 then walletmultiplier=3 else walletmultiplier=1" !?)

Thank you for highlighting this issue. I vaguely remembering seeing the 1x coding earlier this month and hoping that by statement time, it will be ok. Then I never checked until today and saw that my statement didn't code $600+ spend between Jan 1 and Jan 10 (after which my statement is generated) as 3X mobile spend, and has not been coding them since. Now this card doesn't ever see the light of the day despite how nice it feels. It stays in the Apple Wallet section of two iPhones.

I'm chatting with a Cust Serv Rep on this and they're raising a ticket. Let me see what I hear from them. If they have somehow managed to kill the mobile wallet 3X feature then it's an immediate chopping block candidate.

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

SpaethCo — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 21:28:19 GMT

@Ghoshida wrote:
Thank you for highlighting this issue. I vaguely remembering seeing the 1x coding earlier this month and hoping that by statement time, it will be ok. Then I never checked until today and saw that my statement didn't code $600+ spend between Jan 1 and Jan 10 (after which my statement is generated) as 3X mobile spend, and has not been coding them since. Now this card doesn't ever see the light of the day despite how nice it feels. It stays in the Apple Wallet section of two iPhones/

For clarity, when you look at your statement (usually page 3) where it has Rewards Earned, are you short points in the "2 Extra Points: Mobile Wallet" category on your statement, or is it just the 1x display on the portal?

Like on my Janurary 5th statement the math all checks out despite a bunch of purchases showing 1x on the portal:

For what it's worth, it appears that deleting and re-adding your card to Apple / Google Pay will resolve the display issue in the portal because you'll get issued a new virtual device account number that will likely be outside of the "problematic" batch group, and your base + bonus points will start having the same dates again.

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 04:09:04 GMT

@SpaethCo wrote:

Like on my Janurary 5th statement the math all checks out despite a bunch of purchases showing 1x on the portal:

For what it's worth, it appears that deleting and re-adding your card to Apple / Google Pay will resolve the display issue in the portal because you'll get issued a new virtual device account number that will likely be outside of the "problematic" batch group, and your base + bonus points will start having the same dates again.

My Jan 12th statement defintely is giving 1x on the purchases since Jan 1.

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

SpaethCo — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 05:47:59 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
My Jan 12th statement defintely is giving 1x on the purchases since Jan 1.

I wouldn't have expected that, I wonder what happened that your account is so far behind on crediting. I guess I'd prioritize removing / re-adding the card to your mobile wallet in the short term then because that definitely fixed the 3x reporting on my account (and a few other poeple on reddit, it seems?).

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

xenon3030 — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 07:22:07 GMT

Since early Jan, my AR card shows several issues including not triggering 3X (Google Pay) and also not sending SMS after transactions to be able to redeem RTR points. For the payments with Google Pay, it says that the card was manually entered. I hope that they can fix the issues soon. My main motivation to get this card was using it for digital wallet and redeem RTR.

Btw, is it possible to get the transaction history from Google Pay?

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 13:45:19 GMT

@Ghoshida wrote:

I'm chatting with a Cust Serv Rep on this and they're raising a ticket. Let me see what I hear from them. If they have somehow managed to kill the mobile wallet 3X feature then it's an immediate chopping block candidate.

Did they open a ticket?

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

xenon3030 — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 14:45:53 GMT

I called US Bank and they said that the remained 2x rewards shows up in the next statement. So, I need to wait for a month. I do not know whether honoring the 3x within two statements is a new routine, is it an automated routine or shall the customer call each time to request such correction.

Regarding the missing SMS to redeem RTR, they said that they do not know the root-cause while they will investigate it and they asked to call back tomorrow, if I do not receive the missed SMS within 24h.

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

Ghoshida — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 17:05:13 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
@Ghoshida wrote:

I'm chatting with a Cust Serv Rep on this and they're raising a ticket. Let me see what I hear from them. If they have somehow managed to kill the mobile wallet 3X feature then it's an immediate chopping block candidate.
Did they open a ticket?

Yes, but the timeframe is 4 weeks and the response is by mail, so ...

My second statement will be cut by then, so I definitely will keep an eye out if they somehow backdate the points in the second batch process.

I just did a quick search on FT and they have many posts on this issue from earlier this month. Given it's still happening probably means no system-wide solution has been implemented yet. The tech of how the reward tracker codes differently from batch process etc. is just too much for me. Discover has the same feature, except that it only gives the bonus in certain quarters. On Discover, I can easily see Purchase method: Apple Pay. Not sure why US Bank will have a different tracking mechanism. My phone is talking correctly to the terminals too - because Discover coded a purchase as Apple Pay on Jan 10 (I got the pharmacy bonus at CVS).

I'd hold on making any big purchases on this card for a while. I also need to get the SUBs on my new Autograph and SW cards so I'll eat the 3X for a while (sub-optimal, but I'm risk averse).

My biggest gripe is that this is also my SO's go-to-card. SO doesn't want to track the "optimal" card - and with the Reserve's 1.5x on travel redemption, it's the easiest 4.5% cash back on everything card

I hope it is not a sign of a future nerfing of their rewards categories.

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

Ghoshida — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 17:08:42 GMT

@SpaethCo wrote:
@Ghoshida wrote:
Thank you for highlighting this issue. I vaguely remembering seeing the 1x coding earlier this month and hoping that by statement time, it will be ok. Then I never checked until today and saw that my statement didn't code $600+ spend between Jan 1 and Jan 10 (after which my statement is generated) as 3X mobile spend, and has not been coding them since. Now this card doesn't ever see the light of the day despite how nice it feels. It stays in the Apple Wallet section of two iPhones/
For clarity, when you look at your statement (usually page 3) where it has Rewards Earned, are you short points in the "2 Extra Points: Mobile Wallet" category on your statement, or is it just the 1x display on the portal?

Like on my Janurary 5th statement the math all checks out despite a bunch of purchases showing 1x on the portal:

For what it's worth, it appears that deleting and re-adding your card to Apple / Google Pay will resolve the display issue in the portal because you'll get issued a new virtual device account number that will likely be outside of the "problematic" batch group, and your base + bonus points will start having the same dates again.

I'm short in the statement.

I downloaded a bunch of transactions from December to most recent from the rewards tracker page.

I added the transactions made from Jan 1 till when my statement was cut (Jan 10) that were marked as 1x.

I looked at how much I spent and how much I should have received, and the difference was exactly due to those purchases.

BTW I don't use my card physically - ever.

I will try the re-adding process, but I remain a bit sceptical about their systems. It's not a phone issue - it's something on their end.

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

Anonymous — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 21:37:33 GMT

I just called again and got a rep who didn't quite understand my accent (and/or my speed of delivery, words are meant to be used). She said I had a lovely accent and asked what language I spoke (English accent... have a guess).

It turns out that I am not losing points, I am just getting 1% on those transactions! So I guess a subtle technical meaning, perhaps some Altitude Reserve customers are actually losing points.

I explained that I wasn't earning rewards at the correct rate, she tried to argue that I was at least sometimes (since I did the readd trick, one transaction indeed got 3x). But she had no idea of the issue, despite a previous CSR telling me it was a known issue.

So my confidence in at least getting the prior transactions credited is quite low, and while in some way that shouldn't make me reevaluate the card (assuming it doesn't happen again) it sort of does! Just checking now, I have lost, sorry, failed to earn, 20,000, worth 300 for travel

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

SpaethCo — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 22:17:45 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
But she had no idea of the issue, despite a previous CSR telling me it was a known issue.

This might be a bit "inside baseball," but in any organization I've ever worked for the folks answering customer-facing calls are typically in a completely different business segment than the IT engineers who would actually own knowing about and fixing this kind of mass problem. You can only publish "hot news" type information for "everything is on fire!" type events where call centers are overwhelmed and something has to be relayed to callers. For something like this where it's a subset of accounts of one particular product type are experiencing a clerical error (that honestly most customers won't even notice for a while), usually that has to be pushed into a knowledgebase article that the phone agent can pull up via a keyword search. Knowledgebase articles are unbelievably painful to publish at most companies because you can't just type up the issue, you generally have to get the language approved all the way up the engineering management chain, and then the support services management would have to agree to add the KB article to something the reps would be able to reference. The last KB article I published for how to unplug a specific cable if certain conditions were met took 3 months to get into the hands of my current employer's support department.

Minneapolis has a lot of career mobility opportunities for IT engineering staff - there are a surprising number of large IT shops from medical companies like UnitedHealth Group and Metronic, retailers like Target and Best Buy, banks like US Bank and Wells Fargo (carryover from legacy Norwest), airlines like Delta (from Northwest) and Sun Country, food producers like Cargill and General Mills, etc. Some folks I know who have moved over to US Bank seem to be at least tangentially aware of a processing problem that happened at year end. (The folks I know are in network engineering, not systems)

It's frustrating, but pretty much all you can do is wait it out. If it was something that was only happening on your account it would be far more concerning, but for a mass issue like this there's a lot of moving pieces particularly when you're operating on a billing system subject to many regulators and external auditors. The path to recover "simple" batch processing errors on stupid complex legacy HVS / CICS transaction ecosystems is rarely quite as easy as it seems from the outside.

Here's my bet - within 2 statement cycles all the missing points will show up in your account. If I'm wrong, I'll make a $50 donation to any charity of your choosing.

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

NoHardLimits — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 17:24:05 GMT

I have a data point to contribute. I currently have 3 US Bank cards: Altitude Reserve, Cash+, and Shopper Cash Rewards. Upon reviewing the rewards amounts since November 1st (the maximum time frame visible for me), I see that changes have occurred -

For the 2 cards with selectable quarterly categories, Nov & Dec purchases showed the base amount for each transaction (1% for Cash+ and 1.5% for Shopper Cash Rewards). Around the beginning of the following month (Dec 1st and Jan 2nd), the bonus rewards beyond the base rate posted as a lump sum.

For Altitude Reserve, the opposite seems to be happening. The Nov & Dec purchases showed the entire bonused rate of earnings for each transaction (3X for mobile payments). However, my January purchases are only showing 1X right now. I should be able to see by the end of next week whether or not the rest of the points post as a lump sum.

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

digitek — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 17:27:55 GMT

This thread had me take a look at my own rewards and most of my transactions seem to be fine, except for the most important one. Booked some fairly expensive travel through their own travel portal and it lists as only getting x1 rewards... It was Hotel and Airfare in the same transaction, so part should get x5 and part should get x3. Would be kind of mad about it if I'd have to do the transactions separately in order to get the correct points from their own portal, but hopefully can get it sorted somehow.

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

NoHardLimits — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 17:32:49 GMT

@NoHardLimits wrote:
I have a data point to contribute. I currently have 3 US Bank cards: Altitude Reserve, Cash+, and Shopper Cash Rewards. Upon reviewing the rewards amounts since November 1st (the maximum time frame visible for me), I see that changes have occurred -

For the 2 cards with selectable quarterly categories, Nov & Dec purchases showed the base amount for each transaction (1% for Cash+ and 1.5% for Shopper Cash Rewards). Around the beginning of the following month (Dec 1st and Jan 2nd), the bonus rewards beyond the base rate posted as a lump sum.

For Altitude Reserve, the opposite seems to be happening. The Nov & Dec purchases showed the entire bonused rate of earnings for each transaction (3X for mobile payments). However, my January purchases are only showing 1X right now. I should be able to see by the end of next week whether or not the rest of the points post as a lump sum.

Edit: I neglected to say that for Cash+ and Shopper Cash Rewards, each purchase transaction in January is showing the full earn rate for the bonus categories (5% and 6%).

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

SpaethCo — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 17:38:55 GMT

@digitek wrote:
This thread had me take a look at my own rewards and most of my transactions seem to be fine, except for the most important one. Booked some fairly expensive travel through their own travel portal and it lists as only getting x1 rewards... It was Hotel and Airfare in the same transaction, so part should get x5 and part should get x3. Would be kind of mad about it if I'd have to do the transactions separately in order to get the correct points from their own portal, but hopefully can get it sorted somehow.

An important caveat to the Altitude Reserve is that OTAs are NOT a 3x travel category, including US Bank's own portal. With this card US Bank specifically bonuses only hotels and rental cars at 5x through the portal, everything else earns 1x if you book this way.

Re: Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

digitek — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 18:08:40 GMT

@SpaethCo wrote:
@digitek wrote:
This thread had me take a look at my own rewards and most of my transactions seem to be fine, except for the most important one. Booked some fairly expensive travel through their own travel portal and it lists as only getting x1 rewards... It was Hotel and Airfare in the same transaction, so part should get x5 and part should get x3. Would be kind of mad about it if I'd have to do the transactions separately in order to get the correct points from their own portal, but hopefully can get it sorted somehow.
An important caveat to the Altitude Reserve is that OTAs are NOT a 3x travel category, including US Bank's own portal. With this card US Bank specifically bonuses only hotels and rental cars at 5x through the portal, everything else earns 1x if you book this way.