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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?
