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A number of credit cards issued by Chase come with Priority Pass Select membership a s a card benefit and this gives the card holder (+1 or more guests) access to over 1,300 airport lounges (and lounge spaces) around the world.
Recently, however, there appears to have been an issue with the Priority Pass membership issued by at least one of Chase’s cards and for all I know, this may extend further.
Noticing a problem
I’m fortunate enough to hold the excellent Ritz-Carlton card that Chase issues and I and my two authorized users each have our own Priority Pass Select memberships that this card offers.
These memberships don’t get used all too often because I usually have lounge access courtesy of my airline elite status, because Joanna (authorized user #1) usually travels with me and gets into lounges as my guest and because MJ (authorized user #2) doesn’t really care about lounge access.
Recently, however, I discovered that MJ didn’t have her membership card linked in the Priority Pass mobile app (she has a physical card) and when I attempted to add her card to her phone, the app showed her as having an account, but no card could be displayed.
As this wasn’t a pressing issue, I made a mental note to give Priority Pass a call when I had some free time (a rarity at the moment) and I didn’t give it much more thought.
A week later, Joanna (who has a physical Priority Pass card and a digital card on her phone) was traveling without me and attempted to access a Priority Pass lounge.
She was denied access as her card “was not valid”.
That’s all the rather unhelpful lounge agent was able (prepared?) to say and Joanna was told to contact Priority Pass.
All three of our memberships are valid through the end of 2027 and my Ritz-Carlton card is (and always has been) in good standing, so this struck me as odd.
What has happened (apparently)
As I am the primary card holder of the card that issues the Priority Pass memberships, I decided to give Priority Pass a call to see what was going on, and the information I was given was more than a little surprising – apparently, Joanna’s membership had been cancelled at the end of May (by Chase, according to the Priority Pass phone agent).
Next up was a call to Chase where the first agent told me that he couldn’t see anything wrong with my card or the Priority Pass memberships but he put me on hold while he “investigated further”.
After a ~5 minute hold, a new agent came on the line, introduced himself as a supervisor, and explained to me that there “had been an issue with a small sample of Priority Pass memberships” linked to the Ritz-Carlton card and that the people affected had seen their memberships deleted.
The suggestion, at this point, was that the deletion happened at the Priority Pass end and not at the Chase end of the chain.
More importantly, I was told that the issue was “not a simple one to fix” so a solution wasn’t expected to be in place before 20 October 2025.
Worse yet, this doesn’t only affect Joanna, but it affects MJ and me as well – apparently, I don’t have a valid Priority Pass membership from my Ritz-Carlton card either.
Some of this seems odd
Something doesn’t seem quite right here and there are a few things that strike me as being odd.
- If our memberships were deleted, why did the first Chase agent say that he could see the memberships in the system and all seemed in order?
- If this issue dates back to May, why has Chase not contacted any of us to explain the situation?
- How does just a small subset of memberships get deleted?
- Why is there no mention of Priority Pass membership under the list of benefits associated with my Ritz-Carlton card when I log into my account? (It does, however, appear on this page that’s available for all to view).
- What kind of deletion error takes at least four and a half months to fix (assuming the issue occurred at the end of May and will be fixed on/around 20 October)? Why can’t the memberships be reinstated immediately or why can’t new memberships issued?
Something tells me that I haven’t been given the full story yet, but I’ll keep digging and I see if I can get to the bottom of this – I have a trip coming up in a few weeks which will give me an opportunity to check in my membership is really cancelled, so I’ll know more then.
Bottom line
Apparently, a number of Priority Pass memberships linked to the Ritz-Carlton credit card (and maybe even some other Chase-issued credit cards) were deleted as far back as May leaving cardholders without access to one of their card’s key benefits.
Right now, I’m just waiting to see if I can find out exactly what has happened as I’m not convinced that what I’ve been told so far is the full story. Once I do find out, however, I think I’ll be taking this up with Chase again as the least the bank could have done is to let us know that there was an issue in the first place.
Has anyone else had their Priority Pass Select membership cancelled for no good reason?
I have a similar issue with my PP card that comes with the chase sapphire reserve. Although it’s activated on Chase side, PP keeps saying something is not working. Each time I tried to register on the PP side by entering my csr card number, I get charged $1 (the charge is later removed) but I still can’t register for a PP membership number.
Any idea how long this has been going on (for you)?
You can get your PPass membership card in the Chase app. If you can’t access it, call Chase and they may be able to get you a new card. I had an old expired PPass membership through Chase so there was an issue activating a new membership but a call worked it out.
PP has been shedding lounges and restaurants left and right. Personally, I think PP is the problem and they’re a mess internally. I’ve cancelled my Chase Sapphire reserve after PP lost quite a few lounges on the West Coast rendering the PP practically useless for most travelers on the West Coast.
I agree on all counts. PP is considerably less useful for West-coasters than it was, say, 5 or 6 years ago and I’m reasonably sure that any membership issues are as a result of PP screw ups and not of Chase’s making (although I’m not ruling that out entirely).
> “Recently, however, I discovered that MJ didn’t have her membership card linked in the Priority Pass mobile app (she has a physical card) and when I attempted to add her card to her phone, the app showed her as having an account, but no card could be displayed.”
Did both you and MJ have the same issue with the app? My app and Apple Wallet look OK, so I’ll assume my membership hasn’t been accidentally cancelled.
No, MJ had never had the app set up. For Joanna, however, everything in the app looked normal (and continues to do so) but she was denied entry into the lounge.
I’ve noticed a problem on my Chase cards where if I’ve upgraded to a Sapphire Reserve from another card (rather than as a new application), the PP membership doesn’t get activated without calling support, and having to have them manually set it up.
I had a delay in getting my CSR PPass membership activated and Chase directed me to buy one day passes for lounges and then call for reimbursement. The first reimbursement request got stuck somewhere but when I called again, they were able to push it through.
That’s interesting as that feels like Chase was taking responsibility (ie issue at the Chase end and not the PP end)
The issue was that I previously had a Chase-paid PPass membership 5 years ago, so when I upgraded to the CSR, Chase tried to reactivate my old membership. That is why they never sent me a new PP card. Once I called in, of course on the day I was flying out and would need it, they “reset” the membership and told me to just get reimbursement until my card arrived. There was no limit on charges — I spent ~$200, but easily could have spent $500-1000 based on the number of lounges I visited. But it was only Minute Suites that I couldn’t access with my other PP memberships.
I don’t know if this is related to why deletions may be occurring, but I actually have 2 priority pass cards with different numbers in my name linked to the same Ritz card. I received my original one when I got the Ritz card and then when I added an AU they sent me another PP card along with the AU card.
But thankfully I haven’t had any issues with mine, I’m still able to login and I’ve used my PP card from the Ritz card multiple times in the past month.
Good post. It’s important to hold these companies accountable. It’s really sleazy of PP and Chase not to disclose this issue earlier.
I just logged in to chase to check on my Ritz card PP. I have been waiting almost a month for PP cards for my AU.
While on Chase site I noticed that the Ritz card benefits no longer list anything about lounge access at all. I’m wondering if there has been and silent nerf???
Although a different issue, but something that a lot of C1 Venture X users experienced is that Cap1 sends the list of new users for PP, but they take forever to update it in their systems ( ~4 months) in my case and till then, PP would say my Venture X number is invalid. Refer : https://www.reddit.com/r/Venturex/comments/1bdjg7e/unable_to_register_for_priority_pass/