Watch Out for Erroneous Information on the Chase Travel Portal

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Imagine this: You're booked on a multi-segment flight that includes a 15-hour overnight layover in Istanbul — perfect for stretching your legs and doing a quick visit to the Blue Mosque. Your accommodation is booked, and airport transfers all arranged for the 8am flight out the following morning. You arrive at the airport and head to the check-in desks, only to receive boarding passes for... Hong Kong?

That's exactly what may happen, as we found out, if you book a flight from Washington D.C. (IAD) to Kathmandu (KTM) via the Chase Ultimate Rewards Travel Portal. We discovered, from a quick 10-minute search, that some flight itineraries suggested by the portal may contain erroneous information that can potentially cause inconvenience and affect travel plans.

As with this itinerary from the Chase portal, passengers on board Singapore Airlines Flight 1 leaving San Francisco (SFO) will be surprised to find themselves headed for Hong Kong (HKG) instead of Istanbul (IST). Furthermore, the flight continues on to Singapore (SIN) after a short 1-hour layover, arriving, surprisingly, at the same time of 12:00pm as indicated in the itinerary. While you may argue that this, in the grand scheme of things, does not affect the overall journey from IAD to KTM, it will definitely create confusion and cause unnecessary alarm to some, especially those who intend to make good use of that 15-hour layover in Istanbul.

A quick search on Google Flights yielded the same flights, but with more accurate information:

As a second example, let's consider this series of Emirates flights, which will take passengers from Sydney (SYD) to Munich (MUC) in a record-breaking time of 18 hours and 5 minutes.

On close inspection, the first leg from Sydney to Dubai in 9 hours and 20 minutes seemed fishy. A quick check on Google Flights yielded the same itinerary, albeit with a much longer travel time of 26 hours and 40 minutes. The difference? Chase's itinerary had completely dropped the Bangkok (BKK) layover and mistakenly shaved off more than eight hours from this 7,700-mile trek to the Middle East.

When contacted, Chase mentioned that it is aware of this issue, and that it is working to rectify any erroneous information. More importantly, Chase assured us that all issued tickets booked through the portal will show accurate information, which may be different from any erroneous ones resulting from the online glitch.

This should definitely not be a reason to avoid booking through the portal, especially if you can take advantage of the 1.5 cents per point redemption with the Chase Sapphire Reserve. However, we do suggest you double check your itinerary with another trusted source such as Google Flights, or with online travel agencies (OTAs) such as Expedia and Priceline. After all, it's always better to spend an extra 30 seconds to fact check than to spend an additional eight hours on a plane, completely unexpected.