Which OTA’s are most rewarding for hotels?
Tl;dr: Check your rewards rate before booking with an online travel agency.
For many years, I booked the vast majority of my hotels through Expedia. Nowadays, the platform is less appealing in a world where I can get 10x points back by booking directly with Capital One Travel with my Venture X card, get tons of points and perks at IHG properties with my IHG Premier, or find value while netting Delta and United miles with Airbnb.
Nonetheless, online travel agencies (OTAs) like Expedia can still be worthwhile in many cases. You normally won’t earn points or status or benefit from any perks you might receive from status at the hotel you stay at, but that often isn’t an issue at independent hotels that don’t have loyalty programs of their own, or at chains where you don’t have status and are unlikely to earn enough points to ever earn a free night. And when comparing prices with other booking methods, keep in mind that many of the top OTAs can offer triple rewards-earning opportunities.
Credit Card Points
Some credit cards earn bonus points on travel booked through OTAs, including the Chase Sapphire cards (3x Reserve, 2x Preferred), IHG Premier (5x), and Amex Green Card (3x). Other cards have great rates on everyday purchases, like the 2x Capital One Venture X and Citi Double Cash and the 1.5x Chase Freedom Unlimited. Even if your card doesn’t have a bonus on this spending, most good travel cards will earn at least 1 point or mile or 1% cash back on these purchases.
Shopping Portals
Certain OTAs can generate additional points or cash back via shopping portals. For example, at the time of writing, if I started my booking process at Rakuten, I could receive 4% cash back or 4x membership rewards points at Agoda, 3x at Expedia and Orbitz, and 1% at Hotels.com.
Internal Rewards
In addition, some of these OTAs will have their own rewards structure:
OneKey sites (Expedia, Hotels.com, VRBO): offer 2% travel rewards for each $1 spent on hotels, and extra benefits such as higher savings and priority support after 5 “trip elements” (a night in a hotel counts as a trip element). The opportunity to earn, pool, and redeem these points across three different booking sites is an added advantage of this program.
Orbitz: Earn 3% back in “Orbucks” for each $1 spent on hotels online, and 4% when booking via the Orbitz app. After staying 12 nights you’ll earn 50 Orbucks towards various things.
Agoda: Agoda allows you to earn points and miles with various partners, including United and American Airlines. The earning structure isn’t clear from the website (I haven’t tried it yet), and beware: it warns that prices might be higher for these “PointsMAX” bookings than for regular bookings.
Also worth mentioning:
Rocketmiles is a site that offers fairly substantial rewards via partner programs including United, American, Southwest, Alaska Airlines, Amtrak, Marriott, and Amazon. The AA option is particularly interesting, as you earn not only miles redeemable towards free flights, but also “Loyalty Points” that count toward elite status (the lowest level of AA status is unlocked after earning 40,000 Loyalty Points in a year). The returns seem quite good, as you could easily earn 5-10,000 points for a few nights in a relatively inexpensive hotel.
Delta Travel Extras is Delta’s branded version of Expedia. The benefits seem to change throughout the year, but if you are a Delta frequent flyer it may be worth looking into before booking. Recent offers have included 5x miles on hotel bookings and earning Medallion Qualification Dollars toward Delta status for each dollar spent on hotels.