Update: TPG has confirmed that these bookings do earn hotel points, elite night credits and your status is recognized. Fingers crossed when American Express has amextravel offers that these bookings trigger those as well.
American Express offers the fine hotels & resorts program to both personal and business Platinum & Centurion cardholders. Properties booked through this program all come with a number of guaranteed benefits:
- Noon check-in, when available
- Room Upgrade upon arrival, when available
- Daily breakfast for two people
- Complimentary in room Wi-Fi
- Guaranteed 4pm late checkout
- Unique amenity valued at US$100, such as a food and beverage credit or one way private sedan transfer
They have now added a new benefit and you can receive 5x points when booking these properties. There are some restrictions:
- Your booking must be pre-paid (e.g you pay for your room upfront. The cancellation policy remains the same)
- You must book through amextravel.com (phone bookings are excluded)
This is a great addition as previously you effectively had to choose between the FHR benefits or the 5x points and now you receive both. Having to pay in advance seems a little strange, but I guess even if the cancellation policy remains the same hotels see less cancellations this way.
Hat tip to OMaaT
Basically matches the Chase Virtuoso bookings looks like.
well first of all, i dont trust anything TPG says. especially their n00b interns. but they actually do have a few very smart people on staff. and this girl has a PhD in Computer Science. so shes not stupid.
but that article should be met with extreme prejudice. i expected more from someone at her level. i originally thought TPG received confirmation directly from AMEX. No. that post is just one DP. and its way too early when AMEX is still building out their back-end for FHR. lets see what happens after a couple of months.
when large companies merge various platforms, many approaches can be used, but one is to use a simple “data bridge” or a “band-aide” method. meaning, nothing fundamentally changes besides data moving into a new “vessel/server/platform” that has been previously built. this would explain why some bookings made on Amex Travel OTA may simply be flowing through the FHR platform and still be considered “nonOTA” for now.
for example, many YMMV DP already exist for normal OTA bookings in general when it comes to points and status, but its widely known that you are not “entitled” to anything when booking hotels via OTA. but if it was TPG reporting on OTA bookings, they would use Priceline for HH and report “Good News! OTA works!”. um. no.
A lot of hotels seem to be having issues on amextravel.com, but calling in there is availability. Really disappointing about the “online only” piece as I need to book one by tomorrow.
Wondering if prepaid would still eligible for the SNP
im pretty sure this is a deval. i dont like what this is implying. FHR just became OTA.
we need more DP on this. we always need to be skeptical of changes in this game.
I wouldn’t say its a deval since you can always go back the old route to pay at hotel like it used to, but the new added on option is better or not is up for debate tho
yea. we will see how this works in practice. if this new feature is strictly adding a 5x prepay option only on the amex side, then there should be no issues bypassing and keeping FHR as normal. however, if there is an inherent change in the booking process via back-end tech where a property would consider FHR an OTA booking, then we have a problem. prepay or not isnt the problem. i wanna see what the hotels sees.
AFAICT you can still choose to NOT prepay, you just won’t get 5x MR. You can pay with anything else while checking in.
The FHR website seems to be having a bit problem at the moment. I tried several searches (different cities, different dates), and all the hotels are showing “please call to check availability”.
Those are the ones that haven’t put 5x into system yet as the rep told me. I don’t get why they need to shut the system down for this to slow rolling though
Oh I see thanks for the info!
Now that the pre-pay option is available, it’s like the non FHR bookings on Amex travel.
I hope we still can earn stay credit and hotel points from these bookings. That’s the main difference between FHR and non-FHR bookings in the past.
If stay credit and status recognition disappeared on FHR, it would substantially reduce the value of FHR.
We will have to wait and see if the amextravel.com FHR options still give hotel credit. Seems like a trade off choice – more points with Amex on Pre-Paid FHR or traditional FHR with Hotel Status credit.
I had a FHR booking in October. When does the 5x take effect?
Right now for some of the property, mainly chain one like conrad,wa, mandarin oriental and 4s. Chat told me that you have to rebook for 5x though and if your hotel is not bookable online yet then you are sol
I received one for a random bodega on the LES (green star foods) and the UWS 16 handles. Any other NYC folks see these?
Now if only they would add FHR to their flight+hotel booking options.