Update: This is across all cards, not just United cards.
Chase is reducing the benefits on the United co-branded cards effective June 1st, 2018. The following changes will be made:
- Price protection will be discontinued
- Currently they offer up to $500 per item and $2,500 per year if you make a purchase and you see a lower advertised price within 90 days
- Return protection will be discontinued
- Currently they offer up to $500 per item and $1,000 per year on items that the store won’t take back
- Trip cancellation/Interruption coverage will be reduced
- Currently they offer up to $10,000 per trip for trips that are cut short or cancelled due to sickness, severe weather or other conditions
Chase recently added a new hurdle for price protection claims and there was a rumor they would be discontinuing it across all cards later this year so it’s possible this will affect more than just United cards. Citi just reduced their price protection benefit as well. Overall it’s always disappointing when card issuers decide to remove or reduce these auxiliary benefits, the current consensus seems to be that these benefits are expensive to administer and because only a small portion of cardholders are using them (and those cardholders are often seen as ‘abusing’ them) there is not a lot of benefit keeping them long term. I think cardholders value these types of benefits, even when not using them. Insurance products in general are about peace of mind, so I hope this trend doesn’t continue.
Hat tip to The Points Guy
Should we expect similar changes to come to the Sapphire Preferred and the Sapphire Reserve? The Sapphire family has similar benefits to those on the United cards.
Not sure, I doubt it due to the higher annual fees on the Reserve but it’s possible.
Thanks for the heads up. I was looking at picking this one up but a reduction in travel insurance is a deal breaker. I’ll reserve final judgement until we know exactly how much of a reduction is being made.
use paribus while you can. It’s worth it to not use your amazon visa with 5% cb if you have a card with price protection. Check camelcamelcameldotcom and if the price is currently too high, use a card with price protection. if it’s at a low price already, i’ll use giftcards bought with 5urppd or 5%cb.
I keep my United Explorer card partly because of its travel-related insurance. If Chase starts cutting into that then it won’t be any better than any other comparably priced (or cheaper) card, and I might as well downgrade it to a no-annual-fee version and throw it in the sock drawer and forget about it. Coming on the heels of the IHG downgrade I can’t say I’m thrilled with Chase right now. Those are my two cards with them.
Now that Chase is the preeminent credit card issuing bank they can squeeze the customers because there are no real options aside from them, citi is dead, amex is bleeding out. Without competition consumers will continue to lose more benefits
My thoughts exactly.
Hopefully Wells Fargo will get aggressive with there card products, to woe customers after the recent bad behavior by associates or directives of Exec’s.
As a side comment – Citi just removed the language from their Citi rewind guide that they are reducing benefits in July. — https://www.citipricerewind.com/guide
Interesting, thanks.
Reduced to what???
We don’t know.
Wrong dates in post. From source: Effective 06/01/18, Price Protection and Return Protection will be discontinued and Trip Cancellation/Interruption coverage will be reduced.
I didn’t use either benefit, but I think the most disappointing aspect is that Chase is continuing to cut benefits to cards with such little notice.
Now if they could just lose their 5/24 status…