Update: it seems like CLEAR is catching and denying people who have had previous accounts when going to an enrollment center as well. So perhaps I didn’t lose out on too much.
This probably falls under the level of “don’t call the XXXX” but I just wanted to put out a quick warning for others. There was a promotion code going around last week that would give 1 year free of the Family membership to CLEAR, then the renewal would be $50.00 a year after that.
CLEAR is great because it lets you skip the entire ticket checking and waiting for the security belt process. You can combine CLEAR with TSA Pre to skip straight to the security belt in the Pre line, making the whole security process extremely fast!
Anyways, I had already done a 6 month free trial through Visa Signature a while back, and cancelled that account already. I didn’t know whether CLEAR would let me sign up again using my same email, so I signed up again with +clear@ appended so my signup email was now xxxxxxxx+clear@gmail.com. However, the activation email from CLEAR never arrived, and requesting it to be sent again never worked either.
So in response to that, I ended up just signing up again with my normal email xxxxxxxx@gmail.com, and it did allow the promo code to be applied, which led me to believe there weren’t restrictions on the promotion. However, when I messaged CLEAR to cancel that other duplicate account xxxxxxxx+clear@gmail.com as I never got the activation email, I got this response:
I see you have 3 accounts, 2 with the family free promotion as well as an old cancelled account.
I will have to cancel the two duplicate accounts with the family free promotion as that promo was for new members of CLEAR only.
However, I can reactivate your account as a Family Member for $50.00 per year.
Oh crud. And there was nothing I could do to stop him from cancelling both. I hadn’t even gone into the enrollment center yet to activate my membership.
Lesson learned: don’t put eyes on your account if you have some sketchy promotion applied! Also CLEAR can’t handle +xxxx@ in email addresses, so don’t sign up using an email like that.