Changes To How Hotels.com Gift Cards Can Be Merged

Hotels.com gift cards have had quirks for quite some time. You can only redeem one gift card per stay, but some properties don’t allow you to redeem gift cards when making reservations with them.

You can also merge gift cards, but once a gift card has had another gift card merged to it, that one can’t be merged with other gift cards. Being able to merge balances is particularly useful seeing as you can only redeem one gift card per stay. That means you could merge several lower denominations into one larger denomination card to pay for all or most of a stay.

The merging process can be a mix of helpful and frustrating. Hotels.com has partnered with Jigsaw Business Solutions for quite some time to allow you to merge cards online. A few years ago that functionality disappeared temporarily, but it has returned since then. You can also only merge up to five cards online and that has to be done all at one time.

In the past, you could merge Hotels.com gift cards by phone too. However, Eugene reports that they’ve now removed the ability to merge over the phone, replacing it with the ability to merge via email (in addition to still being able to merge online).

If you want to merge your Hotels.com gift cards via email though, hopefully you’ve kept good records of when you purchased them. This is the process based on an email Eugene received:

From [email protected]:

We can merge your gift cards/eGifts for you if you have met the maximum allowance online or want to merge cards that have already been merged.

For us to begin looking into your request we will require:
– Please type down all card numbers, do not supply your PIN. PINs should be kept confidential and are not needed by anyone from hotels.com to support you.
– Please provide proof of payment for all card(s) involved. This ideally should be in the form of a confirmation email or receipt from the gift card provider and should contain your email address and name.
– If you do not have a copy of your proof of purchase, please upload a picture of your gift card (with the PIN covered) and confirm the current balance on the gift card, starting value, and approximate date of activation.

Please note, that only when both requirements are met can we begin looking into your query.

As you can see, in order to merge your gift cards via email, you have to provide proof of purchase. Failing that, you have to provide a picture of your Hotels.com gift card. If you keep records of gift card numbers and PINs in a spreadsheet but don’t have easy access to your purchase records, it’ll be much more tricky getting them to merge your cards. That could be particularly frustrating if you have a collection of partially redeemed gift cards with small balances. If you’re not able to get them merged into a large gift card balance, it means when redeeming it for a stay that you’ll have to pay the remaining balance with a credit or debit card.