Originally Posted by
Eszpresszo
This is my first post, and it might be a bit long. But, I didn't want to start off here, by just asking another question. I want to share my recent experiences with the travel portals and points programs of two popular cards.
Chase Sapphire Reserve gets kudos for good reason. I signed up for it almost 4 years ago, when the bonus points promo was briefly a 100,000 points with a modest spending requirement. Best move I ever made as far as credit cards. It became my preferred card until recently. I used my points almost entirely for flights, as the points are worth 1.25 on travel purchases in their Ultimate Rewards. portal. Sometimes I paid out of pocket for other flights when I could find a much better fare elsewhere or on routes that weren't available through the Chase Travel portal.
Which brings us to the problem with that portal. Travel at Chase is handled through EXPEDIA, for better or worse. The Chase travel portal does NOT offer every option you will find on the Expedia site/app. I also noticed the prices were a tad higher for identical flights and hotels through the Chase portal than on Expedia, itself. Not a deal killer in itself, but a bit odd. The current problem here is the sudden dearth of flight and hotel options on both the Expedia site and the Chase site. Last Spring, I was planning my recent long trip through Southeast Asia (3 months, I'm retired, so I don't make short journeys) and found ample options for my hotels and regional flights. By June, most of those options seemed to disappear? Huh, what happened? I don't think it was just booked up. It's off season, and entire routes just disappeared. I ended up using Booking.com exclusively for hotels (which are cheap in SE Asia). I did also peruse the Expedia site and didn't see many more options, either. Coming back, I found my flight options very limited since I purchased my outbound flight into Asia. My conclusion? I think Expedia is having product issues and consequently it's affecting the options in the Chase program. In the case, I will cancel my Sapphire Reserve until I am eligible for another promo offer and Chase finds a better provider of travel options.
I used most of my remaining Ultimate rewards, points on my flight back to the US. The remainder I will transfer to my Mileage Plus account, which brings us to another good advantage of the Chase points program. You can transfer points to many popular airline travel programs including United. BUT, it's also missing some major carriers like AAdvantage and SkyMiles.
Last year, I got a CapitalOne Venture card after reading good reviews of their travel program, which is "Powered by HOPPER". It's been more than a year ago, but I took advantage of the 75k points, intro offer. To be sure, Hopper had better and more options than Expedia for a flight to Rio, via the Cap 1 travel portal. The points are only valued at 1-to-1. I got a lot of travel out of those 75k miles. Basically into South America, an intracontinental flight there, and a return flight to the US with my points and a small amount of cash.
Now, I am curious about other CC travel programs. I understand that AMEX and Citi both have a travel portals, and both have cards can have generous point offers. But, my question is, are their travel programs any good? Any other cards with proprietary travel portals I should know about? Please chime in with your experiences.
my impression of these portals (chase, amex, or others like expedia) is more of a YMMV. for example, i am not seeing your problem with chase travel portal. i managed to book 2 domestic and 1 international flights with them in the last few months, and the prices are the same as on expedia, google flights and/or the airlines' website. not sure about the availability of options, but i found the flight i wanted each time. i also used hopper to monitor flights, but i have never book through them. i find that they almost always gave me a higher price (sometimes a few hundreds more) and while i dont compare the availbility of options, my impression is hopper doesnt seem to have the same availability as search aggregators like google flights and skyscanner. i note that c1 price matches, but that can be a real pain if many flights are more expensive and you risk that the price increasing between the time you book and the time you contact c1.
if you are looking for aa or skymiles, you can earn the former with aa cards from citi and barclays, and the latter with amex (amex also carry delta cards, and these can only transfer to delta). personally, i prefer amex cards as they generally can earn points faster and have much more flexibility with the points. depending on which card you sign, they also give pretty good benefits. but, if you dont mind me asking, why have you chosen these 3 ffps?