After more than two weeks in the dark, it seems Capital One cardholders' long nightmare is finally over.
The ability to send Venture Miles from cards like the Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card and the Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card to partner airlines and hotel chains first went down sometime around Wednesday, Sept. 21. Beyond telling Thrifty Traveler earlier this week that this functionality should return soon after completing “system improvements,” the bank offered little to no explanation for the outage – let alone an apology to customers.
By Friday afternoon, the ability to send miles to Capital One transfer partners had come back online. After showing “Down for Maintenance” for two-plus weeks, some cardholders logging into their Rewards portals suddenly saw the usual “Transfer Miles.” Our team tested it out this afternoon with a transfer to Emirates Skywards, which went through instantly.
Capital One did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation, including whether they can assure cardholders that the issue has been permanently fixed.
If true, it's great news. But that doesn't mean Capital One is out of the spotlight yet.
A two-plus-week outage of a points program's core function – not to mention some of the best ways to use Capital One Venture Miles – is unprecedented. Among the big banks with transferrable points, sporadic issues like this crop up occasionally. But they typically only affect one transfer partner at a time, not the entire slate. And it usually gets resolved within a matter of days or less – not weeks.
Worst of all, Capital One essentially went radio silent throughout the ordeal. Aside from responding to requests for comment from sites like ours, the bank never communicated with cardholders about the problem.
Our questions about the cause of this weeks-long issue have gone unanswered, as have questions about how Capital One plans to make this right by customers. We've heard from readers who went to finally book a big trip after saving up hundreds of thousands of Venture Miles only to find those miles were stuck in limbo.
Capital One owes cardholders and customers some better answers. That's especially true of travelers who opened the Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card this time last year, some of whom might suddenly be thinking twice about renewing their card.
This is a developing news story, check back for updates.
A C1 rep told me on 10/6 they were working on sending out a communication to cardholders “ASAP.” What a lie. Really going to rethink my card after this ordeal.
They have removed their hotel gift card redemption options which were their best reward. No explanation.