Your Hotels.com Rewards is becoming One Key
 

Looks like hotels.com is scrapping their rewards and combining with Expedia and Vrbo. Looks like base earning is changing to 2% instead of 10% with the stamp program.

Yeah, basically this nukes the program value for me since I have stuff like Capital One where I get 10x back vs 2%.

Hotel.com rewards becoming OneKey
 

Please elaborate. Are they cancelling/changing/diminishing the free night program?

2% back instead of 10%

New rewards program soon. Read here: https://www.hotels.com/one-key

Yep. Expedia is canceling the current program and moving to cashback kind of thing at the basic rate of 2%. The top "elite" members might get 6%. Nothing like the current 10% thing. Email just arrived yesterday.

No other hotel booking site gave 10% back, so that's it for the major OTAs. I certainly hope this does not affect the earnings on credit card programs.

Yeah, the 0.2% on flights made me chuckle :) Anything less than 5% is probably not worth the hassle. The free night/10% thing was the only reason I stuck with hotels.com in spite of the recent awful Expedia interface changes (moving to the common interface with Expedia itself).

I had a look at the new program - looks like they will convert existing stored hotel nights to points in the new system.

Is there a starting date for the new program? If a booking is made before the new starting date do the old rules apply?

No specific date, the email said "mid 2023". According to the email, the earnings will be based on the date of the stay, not the booking. My latest booking through hotels.com is for June, past that I'll probably book with whomever cheapest (which is usually not them)

I have 8 bookings through to the end of September. I will probably switch to just using my hotel chain cards. I rarely use them now because the free night made hotels.com better value, and when they had that huge Capital One Venture card deal they were almost unbeatable.

Terrible. I have used hotels.com for over a decade because when I traveled, I was much more sensitive to location of hotel (and respective amenities) than to being loyal to a hotel chain. The rewards program was simple to use and understand. Now I have 7 nights - with an extremely high average value - and I feel that I am going to need to figure out a way to fish out another 3 nights of booking so that I can use the points before the new system goes into effect. It may (finally) be time for me to lean more into looking at hotel credit cards and seeing what is meaningful or worthwhile.

I saw this tonight. I use hotels.com a lot when I travel to Europe, as well as with chains in the US where I stay infrequently such as LaQuinta (since the Wyndham purchase), Country, Comfort, and some casino properties. I actually have six nights in April, which will finish off one reward and get me half way to another one.

At 2%, I will probably look to use something like Rakuten instead.

What happens to the nights we’ve earned. I have over 10 nights free with the current hotels.com program. Should I be using these asap?

They will be converted to Expedia "$$$" at the same value. I had some of those Expedia "coins" and it did book fine, applied to hotel price. It's just the future earnings that will be affected.

I just came across this news when I was looking to book a trip this morning. I kept thinking I must be overlooking something, because my first impression was that my rewards were going down from 10% to 2%, and surely that can't be right! :eek::o

Guess I wasn't misreading. Now I have to figure out what to do with my existing earnings. I've got 4 stamps earned right now and they're at a higher dollar value than my average. I was going to book 3 more nights in May, but now I'm not sure if I should do it through them, since i can book for 5% cheaper through another site. If I thought I could get 3 more nights before the move to One Key, I'd do it, but with the date of moving not clear, I'm not sure I want to take the risk.

I had a 2-night stay that would have taken me up to 9 stamps, but I opted to defray the cost with some UR points and book via Chase's travel portal. This is going to heavily change my leisure booking habits for hotels going forward. Expedia must have done the analysis and realized most of their bookers are not consistent travelers / users of the site to impose such a ridiculous devaluation.