Chase used to offer travel bookings via their Ultimate Rewards site through cxLoyalty. cxLoyalty booked the lowest rates from a range of online travel agencies, which resulted in lower prices.
In 2018 Chase switched to Expedia, which generally led to higher prices. That mattered as cards like Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card and Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card offer a 25% bonus when redeeming for travel through Chase and Sapphire Reserve offers a 50% bonus when redeeming for travel through Chase.
Chase wasn’t happy with the outsourced travel though and they will now bring it in house by purchasing cxLoyalty’s travel and rewards business. It will be a new division of Chase consumer lending and card services.
That means the Expedia days are numbered, though the transition won’t happen overnight.
As a travel agent, Chase will also be able to negotiate more deals with hotels and airlines, which may lead to more co-brand cards and transfer options and lower redemption costs.
cxLoyalty also serves Citi, Capital One, USBank, and more, so it will be interesting to see if those banks will continue to use cxLoyalty or if they will bail to the likes of Expedia.
What do you think of Chase purchase of cxLoyalty’s travel and rewards business?
Leave a Reply
25 Comments On "Chase Buys cxLoyalty’s Travel And Rewards Business, Will Revert Ultimate Rewards Portal From Expedia Back To cxLoyalty"
All opinions expressed below are user generated and the opinions aren’t provided, reviewed or endorsed by any advertiser or DansDeals.
This is great news as I have not been a fan of the Expedia portal, amount of offerings, pricing, and customer service.
If you’re not happy with the amount of offerings from Expedia…..you will extremely disappointed when you see what cxLoyalty offers. Despite all it’s shortcomings, Expedia does provide excellent inventory.
yeh but hire prices.
Will they still have access to vacation rentals?
NOPE – I hate the new portal for hotels – can’t search for hotels with kitchenettes or vacation rentals.
Oh well. I guess there’s still time to use CSR points at 1.57 value with Airbnb.
The website was horrible. Expedia experience way better. Just checked what Citi offers through the website and it does not look great
Will count as booking directly with hotel chain ?
Nope.
What will happen to all the Covid refunds / requests for refunds being handled by Chase Travel Expedia?
expedia for hotel bookings is horrible. much prefer priceline….
This sounds like great news as Expedia has the worst customer service I’ve probably ever experienced.
Well, since it’s contracted out to Intuit, you can just know how bad the service is…
Even worse. They contracted out to Tata for a lot of their CS work.
Not surprised. Expedia’s CS throughout the pandemic has been utterly pitiful.
How about bookings for vacation rentals with the new portal?
cxLoyalty has better hotel prices?
This is GREAT! I have had many issues with booking I have made through the Chase portal and Chase could do NOTHING to help me out due to Expedia’s small print and/or weak relationship with some of their vendors. This should change that for the better.
I missed being able to book Spirit and Frontier with UR. Im happy about the change
Now we just need to get AMEX to switch over to literally any other travel service
Like Expedia portal some hotels had availability thru Expedia…
But I guess its a good time to buy OTA’s.
I haven’t booked through their portal in a very long time, but I booked with them years ago before the transition to Expedia, and it was literally TRASH.
For example, if you selected an outbound on Swiss, it wouldn’t offer any return flights other than Swiss. None of the JV combinations were offered online. And when calling in to have an agent manually put together the itinerary, most agents would say if it’s two airlines you need to book two one ways. Or other garbage like that. It would take multiple calls until reaching a semi-competent agent. They were definitely not savvy travel agents who were taking the calls.
Hopefully things are better there, these days.
I think we did better with Chase pre-Expedia.
ever tried booking vacation rentals with them? if you found one only fly there with spirit as dan wont let friends fly spirit same to avail rentals on expedia !
There are no hotel options and it is very expensive how come no one is complaining about the chase portal?