Originally Posted by SpaethCo

I’m honestly surprised to see so many people trying to book flights through any portal (Chase/CapOne/Amex/whatever). With the constantly looming threat of IRROPs in the current travel environment, I think I’d have to be saving multiple hundreds of dollars to make it worth the risk for me personally.

As with everything, YMMV I guess.

Originally Posted by SpaethCo

The nightmare scenario I want to avoid is being at the airport with a human in front of me willing to help me adjust my ticket to get me home, but being unable to do so because the airline doesn’t “own” the reservation and won’t take it over.

That’s why I stick to “utility” hotel bookings only on the portal. If I show up for 1 night at an airport hotel, even if the portal provider mangles my reservation badly I can likely still bail myself out by booking (albeit at a much higher rate) on the spot to still have a room for the night.

Originally Posted by eponymous_coward

This is pretty much me as well. I haven’t booked an airline ticket through an online portal for many years.

My annoyance at the C1 portal is that you can’t change reservations, you have to cancel and rebook, and you can’t cancel online, you have to call (ugh, they’re understaffed and wait times are ugly).

But using C1’s portal for hotel bookings is fine aside from that nuisance factor, I probably book more hotels from Hotels.com than chains I hold credit cards/status in, so using C1 isn’t so much different. It may well be what I default to if Hotels.com implodes their loyalty program to merge with Expedia’s very low value program.