How Travel Portals Fail: The Brutal Truth Of Botched Reservations, Lost Refunds, And Endless Holds

Bilt Rewards Vice President Richard Kerr wrote up an in-depth explanation of travel portals. Bilt uses Expedia for members who want to redeem their points at 1.25 cents apiece towards paid travel, whether it’s hotel or airfare or other bookings.

American Express, Chase, Citi, and others have travel portals and it’s common to use a third-party ‘white label’ service like this. Kerr explains what he views as the good and bad of doing so, and ends with “I’m excited for 2025.” My Straussian reading is there are planned changes to the Bilt travel portal, perhaps related to some of the pain points he mentions.

Outlining The Good And Bad Of Travel Portals

Kerr explains that it’s tough to get to scale, being able to offer all the inventory of the world for flights and hotels, especially with the legacy technology in use all over the world. That’s the good. Expedia handles all of the commissions, and those commissions support a high value per point. Also good.

He identifies problems, though:

• Rates and fares that are sometimes higher through portals than booking direct
• Customer service when problems arise, though Kerr defends Expedia saying the metrics he sees are good. I think he gives Expedia a bit too much of a pass on customer service.
• Cumbersome to customize or offer promotions
• You usually don’t earn points, status credit, or receive status recognition on hotel bookings through portals (although American Express Fine Hotels & Resorts can organize this, and Chase has been rolling out properties where their bookings are treated as direct).

There Are Reasons To Book Through Third Parties, But They Should Be Better Than They Are

Chase Travel announced a goal to hit $15 billion in sales in 2025. At that scale it should be pretty easy to solve the problem of hotels treating their guests poorly. American Express has Hilton and Marriott relationships, Chase has IHG, Marriott and Hyatt. They’re the biggest account these chains have. I told an American Express Executive Vice President years ago that it was criminal that they couldn’t leverage that relationship so that Amex Travel bookings were always treated as direct bookings by their partners.

Now, there are some benefits to booking through an online travel agency that I see.

• Sometimes you’ll get better pricing, just as sometimes it’s worse
• Expedia’s country-specific websites, for fares originating in those countries and not available outside of those countries can be helpful (though those aren’t as common as they used to be)
• And there are sometimes glitches with the settlement tables for specific country sales, involving specific airlines and destinations, that may drop out part of a ticket’s price (such as surcharges)
• Plus there are rewards, however small, for going through a shopping portal to an online agency sometimes and of course the agency’s own rewards program. (Expedia has consistently devalued theirs, over and over.)

Booking Through Online Travel Agencies Always Seems To Go Sideways For Me

You’ll almost invariably get worse customer service than dealing with an airline directly. A travel agent is supposed to be your advocate, not an impediment, but with online travel agencies who make money by driving down the cost of servicing a ticket (underinvesting in customer service) it’s often a game of telephone with two cups and a strike between you and the airline with the agency in the middle. And the agent you work with, perhaps with a wait to reach an outsourced employee with little authority who themselves must wait to reach a supervisor, is often unhelpful in the extreme.

I’ve never once had a good customer service experience with a booking that needed fixing or a flight that needed changing when working through a portal. In the best case it’s a phone call that takes too long. More often it’s reaching an unempowered agent after a long hold, who themselves must hold for their own support, who comes back with erroneous information.

Most reservations turn out fine. You usually don’t need to make changes to your flight itinerary, the hotel honors the booking (the hotel actually exists – but not always!). It’s just that I don’t find these tools to have your back whenever anything isn’t standard or straightforward.

I’ve covered issues with Expedia before, for instance how they say it is common for customers with prepaid rental car bookings to lose their reservation and be out the money when their flight gets delayed; about refusing to refund a hotel stay after the hotel didn’t honor the booking leaving a guest without a hotel room or their money; about a guest getting stuck with a $4,600 resort fee on an Expedia booking; and here’s a cautionary tale about booking airline tickets through Expedia.

There’s A Huge Opportunity To Do Booking Better

When travel booking went online that put a lot of information in the hands of consumers and reduced the cost of booking tickets. It largely took people (agents) out of the middle. Something was lost in the process – expert guidance on what flights are best to book for reliability, like whether a one hour connection in Chicago during the winter is advisable or whether to take the last flight of the day.

There’s a huge opportunity to improve the online booking experience and nobody has really done it. A decade ago I thought that Google, with its ability to know a consumer’s habits and searches, would step into the breach through AI but that hasn’t happened.

Most people use sites like Expedia or Kayak to compare options because they don’t start off knowing they want to fly American Airlines or United. They find the schedule and price they’re looking for, and then book what looks best. Orbitz, now owned by Expedia, actually began as a competitor owned by the airlines. Priceline – now Booking.com – was in part owned by its participating airlines as well. Those sites didn’t limit you to booking flights on a single airline or its partners.

While it can be useful for the average consumer to search flights with Expedia or the like, it’s not usually a good idea to buy travel from them unless they are able to construct complicated itineraries at a lower price than booking directly. Instead, find the flights you want and then go straight to the airline to buy your ticket.

Credit: Expedia

Someone will disrupt booking, eventually. They’ll offer you guidance on what you should be booking, based on what product and schedule best matches your preferences and based on risk factors like historical performance, connecting time, additional backup flight opportunities and usual weather. And eventually airlines will pay more than lip service to the idea of making customized marketing offers to customers.

In the meantime, we’re stuck with Expedia and their competitors. And I avoid booking points redemptions through travel portals because if anything goes wrong I’ll have to deal with their customer service on it, and because I’ll wind up in the “Expedia room” at the hotel. So I’d sure like to know what “I’m excited for 2025” in the context of travel portals could mean.

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