Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

[xenon3030]

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.

[Ghoshida]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@Ghoshida wrote:

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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. 

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Did they open a ticket?

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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. 

[Ghoshida]

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@SpaethCo wrote:

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@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.

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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. 

[Anonymous]

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

[SpaethCo]

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@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.

[NoHardLimits]

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.

[digitek]

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.

[NoHardLimits]

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@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.

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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%).

[SpaethCo]

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@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.

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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.

[digitek]

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@SpaethCo wrote:

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@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.

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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.

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