Chase Buys cxLoyalty’s Travel And Rewards Business, Will Revert Ultimate Rewards Portal From Expedia Back To cxLoyalty

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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 Preferred and Sapphire Preferred 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?

24 COMMENTS

Older First
  1. Dani

    This is great news as I have not been a fan of the Expedia portal, amount of offerings, pricing, and customer service.

    • jaymar01

      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.

      • Dan\'s the Man

        yeh but hire prices.

  2. yelped

    Will they still have access to vacation rentals?

    • Jackie

      NOPE – I hate the new portal for hotels – can’t search for hotels with kitchenettes or vacation rentals.

      • yelped

        Oh well. I guess there’s still time to use CSR points at 1.57 value with Airbnb.

  3. PM

    The website was horrible. Expedia experience way better. Just checked what Citi offers through the website and it does not look great

  4. Chaim

    Will count as booking directly with hotel chain ?

  5. Yaacov

    What will happen to all the Covid refunds / requests for refunds being handled by Chase Travel Expedia?

  6. eli

    expedia for hotel bookings is horrible. much prefer priceline….

  7. Marques

    This sounds like great news as Expedia has the worst customer service I’ve probably ever experienced.

    • yelped

      Well, since it’s contracted out to Intuit, you can just know how bad the service is…

      • Ted

        Even worse. They contracted out to Tata for a lot of their CS work.

  8. Wcf

    Not surprised. Expedia’s CS throughout the pandemic has been utterly pitiful.

  9. EliJelly

    How about bookings for vacation rentals with the new portal?

  10. NYC

    cxLoyalty has better hotel prices?

  11. JP

    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.

  12. Y

    I missed being able to book Spirit and Frontier with UR. Im happy about the change

  13. yitz

    Now we just need to get AMEX to switch over to literally any other travel service

  14. KS111

    Like Expedia portal some hotels had availability thru Expedia…
    But I guess its a good time to buy OTA’s.

  15. Yandmk

    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.

  16. Jack out of the Box

    I think we did better with Chase pre-Expedia.

  17. yitz

    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 !

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