Chase Ultimate Rewards points have long boasted one of our highest valuations, as you can redeem this transferable loyalty currency with 14 valuable travel partners, including Hyatt, Southwest and United.
24.05.2024 - 11:07 / skift.com / Dennis Schaal / Glenn Fogel / Chase Travel / Morgan Chase
Chase Travel grew sales last year at a pace on par with Booking Holdings and far ahead of Expedia Group.
Still, Chase Travel is a fraction of their size and it’s been around only a few years – it launched its new brand identity just this year.
And it reported at its annual investor day earlier this week that “macro travel headwinds” were impacting its profit margins. Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel, meanwhile, said he saw “resiliency in global leisure travel demand” in the first quarter.
Chase Travel, which skews toward travelers looking for premium trips, is seeing softness among luxury-oriented travelers. Marianne Lake, CEO of Consumer & Community Banking, which includes travel, told investors that “higher income segments are showing lower growth with slowing discretionary spend, including in travel and luxury retail.”
Chase Travel, a division of JPMorgan Chase, said its aim is to attract new customers and to gain share from competitors, which in the case of Booking Holdings and Expedia, have been around for decades.
Let’s look at the latest gross bookings numbers, which is the total amount of travel sold, not revenue, at Chase Travel compared to Booking and Expedia.
Chase Travel grew its gross bookings 25% year-over-year in 2023, edging out Booking Holdings at 24%.
Expedia Group, which was putting the finishing touches on rolling its Vrbo vacation rental unit onto a common Expedia-Hotels.com tech platform last year, lagged with growth at just 10%.
Chase Travel, of course, should be growing faster given that it’s essentially a travel startup. It was just 6.6% the size of Booking Holdings in gross bookings in 2023, and 9.6% the size of Expedia Group. It’s notable that Booking grew at a similar pace.
In addition, Expedia supplies a major portion of Chase Travel’s hotel supply. So gross bookings growth at Chase Travel is good news for Expedia Group — unless a chunk of Chase Travel’s customers would have otherwise booked at Expedia.
At JPMorgan’s investor day a year ago, the company said Chase Travel was on track to do $10 billion in sales in 2023, which it achieved, and $15 billion in 2025. Chase didn’t explicitly reiterate that $15 billion target for its travel business this week. However, it may be folded into a $30 billion target for all of its commerce platforms that Chase articulated a few days ago.
Along with the official launch of Chase Travel in 2024, it ran its first national multimedia brand campaign, Where Travelers Go. [You can also view the ad below.]
The company now has six airport lounges — Expedia and Booking have none — including two it opened this year at LaGuardia and JFK. Six more are in the pipeline.
Chase Travel offers more than 350,000 hotels, and last year it launched a
Chase Ultimate Rewards points have long boasted one of our highest valuations, as you can redeem this transferable loyalty currency with 14 valuable travel partners, including Hyatt, Southwest and United.
Attention, bibliophiles: Put Strasbourg, the largest city in eastern France, on your radar. Once home to the godfather of publishing — the 15th-century printing-press pioneer Johannes Gutenberg — the city is the UNESCO World Book Capital for 2024. Through next April, more than 200 events and activities will take place in and around Strasbourg, a polyglot city on the German border whose half-timbered gingerbread houses, gabled roofs, picturesque canals and church spires seem to have sprung from a storybook of their own.
Short-term rental veterans for years have said “professionalization” is key to industry expansion. But Airbnb believes that its individual hosts — and not professional property managers — is one of its biggest advantages over Vrbo and Booking.com.
India is becoming a fast-growing source of outbound tourism, according to a report by consulting firm McKinsey and Company.
Airbnb hasn’t been vocal about its strategy for experiences since it paused adding new ones last year or even a couple of weeks ago when it confirmed it has been removing some experiences providers from its platform.
Good morning from Skift
Online and offline travel agencies had faced a July 11 deadline: That’s when flyers buying American Airlines tickets on certain booking sites would have no longer been able to earn AAdvantage Miles.
The Chase Sapphire Reserve® is one of the best travel credit cards in the points and miles world, constantly ranking as a top premium card.
Glenn Fogel, the CEO of both Booking Holdings and its flagship brand, Booking.com, was the highest-paid travel CEO among the bosses of S&P 500 companies in 2023, with a total package of $46.7 million.
Belfast City Airport has officially commenced its highly anticipated charter services to Barcelona and Bologna with Royal Caribbean International.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Susanna Song, 29, who quit her job as a business analyst-slash-consultant to move from Toronto, Canada, to Miami, Florida with her husband in March. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Good morning from Skift. It’s Friday, May 24. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.