If American Express wanted to continue to operate their own consumer travel agency they would not have outsourced Amex Travel to Travelocity in 2004. They switched to Orbitz in 2011. Expedia acquired Travelocity -and- Orbitz in 2015, and that's how Expedia came to be the service provider for American Express. We didn't see widespread expressions of dissatisfaction with Expedia until the lockdown phase of the pandemic when travel providers were simply refusing refunds and changing policies frequently. I don't think we can judge Expedia's longterm service from that period when everyone struggled.
Good points, but Amex really had no choice but to outsource it in 2004. Amex doesn't have the technology to be able to run a full-fledged web-based OTA and all that entails. But note the date: they first outsourced this in 2004, and Platinum Travel Service continues on to this very day. They haven't shut it down for 17 years - surely the cost advantages of shutting it down would have been as obvious 15 years ago as it is now, yet PTS survives. Maybe this will change but they don't seem to be in a huge hurry. And I think as I noted earlier there are a significant number of high value customers who still use it.
I agree that Expedia complaints got far worse during the pandemic but I've been reading online horror stories about Expedia for many years before the pandemic.
Chase owns cxLoyalty, and only transitioned their portal from Expedia a week ago. It's premature to judge their relative performance, but what we do know is that cxLoyalty does not book hotels directly, they shop bookings for the best price (for their benefit, not ours), and many hotel bookings are placed through Expedia because their share of the consolidator market is huge.
cxLoyalty used to run Chase's travel portal before Expedia, and again, based on many reports from before the pandemic people used to say that Chase's travel portal was once far better than it was after they switched to Expedia. Same sorts of complaints we see about AmexTravel.com: phone agents who aren't well-trained and can't handle changes or cancellations, weird problems with reservations that took hours to resolve over the phone, etc. There were already posts about how much better Chase's travel portal used to be in the cxLoyalty days. It's no wonder to me that Chase finally gave up on Expedia and decided not only to go back to cxLoyalty but to actually BUY cxLoyalty.
As for Hopper, it's early days there too but I have to say their app is amazing, but I admit I've never had to try to deal with Hopper customer service if something goes wrong. However, their tech is very, very good.