Platinum Passport Club

NOTICE OF PROGRAM CHANGE

As a Platinum Passport Club member, you are one of Berwick Travel’s most loyal clients, and we sincerely appreciate your business over the years. The PPC program has been in place since 2004, almost unchanged, but as the travel industry changed around us, the features and benefits of the program became more challenging to implement.

Because the PPC program points are considered a ‘discount’ when applying a payment to a client reservation, essentially dollars off what is sent to a particular travel supplier, over the past few years we’ve been unable to apply that due to supplier discounting restrictions. Most notably, this first began with the cruise lines – they only allowed full payment to be made and stopped allowing less-than-total payments to be applied to reservations. The purpose of this was noble: they did not want their products “cheapened” by online discount agencies or membership clubs who offered below-retail pricing, so they began requiring full payment to be made via client credit card. And while Berwick Travel is not one of those discounters, the net result was the same: applying less than full payment when a client used their PPC points.

These same no-discounting policies have made their way into several other of our featured destinations and experiences, with more and more travel suppliers not allowing partial payments to be made. These included Disney trips, several wholesalers, and when we book a client’s trip directly with a hotel chain. Because of this, we’ve been unable to apply earned points to more and more new reservations, and the PPC program benefits became less and less valuable. While earning points was still valid on all reservations, it was more difficult to apply those as a discount. You may have even been one of those clients we had to unfortunately say no to!

For this reason, the PPC program is being wound down, or “sunsetted”, at the end of 2022. We do hope to be able to replace and even improve the program’s features and benefits in the near future and will keep all of our members posted.

POINTS: To earn and/or apply PPC points, members must book a new trip no later than June 30, 2022, for travel no later than December 31, 2022. Points will be earned for any trips booked by 6/30/22, but all existing PPC points will expire at the end of 2022 and cannot be applied to any trip 2023 or later.