American Express Travel (USA) is currently outsourced to Expedia, but the others are not.
Capital One uses Hopper
Chase uses cxLoyallty (which is owned by Chase)
Citi uses Booking.com
The hotel business is fundamentally different than the airline business in that Consolidators buy large blocks of room nights at a substantial discount.When you book a hotel stay though an agency you are often buying from a Consolidator's inventory. Expedia and Booking are Consolidators. cxLoyalty and Hopper are not, but they often fulfill room nights through Consolidators.
Thanks for that insight. Booking.com is abysmal for flights, though I lean heavily on them for hotels. Their price for a ticket from SAT to BOG on Aeromexico (same flight, same date, same fare class) was about 3 times the actual price on Aeromexico's website. Scratch Citi. Thanks for saving me the frustration. Expedia is clearly going downhill. That I'm convinced of. Avoid AMEX for points, as well?
Yes, I'm hip to how hotel consolidators work - I went to work for Hotels Reservation Network in 1999, before it IPO'd and changed it's name to Hotels.com, and Barry Diller acquired it under what became Interactive Corp after various, mindless name changes. I got laid off around the time we got merged into our sister-company, EXPEDIA. I disliked my counterparts at Expedia, so there is a bit of schadenfraude on my part, in regards to their obvious current issues.
Maybe I should start looking at
cashback cards instead.