How I Book Travel with the Capital One Shopping Portal

However, my recent experiences with the Capital One Shopping portal have highlighted the upside of paying cash and forced me to reconsider my approach.

In my experience, however, the best way to score deals is with the Capital One Shopping browser extension. With the extension installed, I’ve gotten several valuable targeted offers for products or brands I’ve searched for. The portal’s landing page puts it this way:

“Capital One Shopping monitors the products you view and purchase on e-commerce sites in order to notify you when savings are available for those products across various retailers, and to in turn update other Capital One Shopping users on the latest prices available for products they’ve viewed or purchased.”

Unlike other shopping portals I use, Capital One Shopping does not offer cash back. Instead, Shopping Rewards can be used to buy gift cards from a variety of retailers, services and travel providers. I prefer cash to gift cards, but the quality and variety of redemption options is good enough that I value Capital One Shopping Rewards at about 80% of their face value.

However, nightly cash rates were elevated over the holiday weekend, and since both loyalty programs use dynamic award pricing, award rates at each property were also inflated. I wanted to keep costs down, but I was reluctant to redeem points for what felt like middling value.

Then I remembered an email offer I got from Capital One Shopping for rewards on Avis rentals. I have long used shopping portals to earn cash back and rewards for retail purchases, but since I mostly book travel with points and miles, I wasn’t in the habit of using a shopping portal for travel purchases.

While the Avis offer wasn’t relevant to my stay in Richland, it made me curious to check portal rewards rates for hotel stays. I ran a few searches using the Capital One Shopping browser extension, and sure enough, the next day my inbox had offers for 25% rewards at the Holiday Inn and 30% rewards at the Hampton Inn.

Prepayment wasn’t required to earn Shopping Rewards. Knowing I could cancel later if I changed my mind, I clicked through to Hilton from the Capital One Shopping email and made a $456.60 reservation for two nights at the Hampton Inn. After failing to find a better deal in the months that followed, I stuck with it.

Upon completing my stay in August, I received email confirmation my rewards were on the way, and a few weeks later my account was credited with $138.25 — oddly, the amount I received was slightly more than 30% of what I spent.

However, booking an award would have cost me the opportunity to earn $138.25 in portal rewards from Capital One Shopping, as well as the 7,623 Hilton Honors points I earned for my stay. Those rewards add up to around $150 of value I wouldn’t have earned by booking with points, effectively reducing my award redemption value to 0.34 cent per point. I wouldn’t redeem Hilton points at that rate unless I was desperate to lower out-of-pocket costs.

This example illustrates how shopping portal rewards incentivize paying cash for travel. When portal rates are high enough, the value of booking with cash becomes too good to pass up.

Many major credit card issuers and travel providers offer shopping portals (such as Shop Through Chase and AAdvantage eShopping), as do numerous websites and apps that aren’t affiliated with other loyalty programs.

I’m willing to sacrifice some value in exchange for convenience, reliability and good customer service, so for years I have favored Rakuten even when other portals offered a higher rate. However, Capital One Shopping has won me over with higher targeted offers.

In contrast, Capital One Shopping tends to offer lower rates when I search directly through the app or online portal. However, I often get much higher rates via targeted email offers. For example, I received a Hotels.com email offer for 30% rewards:

I’ve also received targeted email offers of 17% back at Priceline, 24% back at IHG and 16% back at Choice Hotels. (Keep in mind that these are targeted offers, and can vary over time or by user; your experience might be different.)

Even though I put a premium on Membership Rewards points and discount the value of Shopping Rewards, these targeted email offers from Capital One Shopping are all worth more to me than the respective payouts at Rakuten.

The targeted rewards rates I get from Capital One Shopping make me much more inclined to pay cash for travel, but I’ve had to adjust to a few features of the portal.

There’s a lot of fine print. The email offers I get from Capital One Shopping come with a litany of restrictions. Most offers cap how much I can earn; for example, the Hotels.com offer above is limited to $250 in rewards. Sometimes advertised rewards rates apply only to specific items or categories; other purchases may earn at a lower rate or be excluded entirely. I have to read the terms of each offer carefully to make sure I’ll earn the rewards I expect.

Targeted rates don’t last long. Email offers typically last for no more than a few days, and many are valid for only a single day. To take advantage of targeted rates for travel, I have to book quickly even if my plans are uncertain. That leads me to book more speculatively than I would otherwise, which can be dicey depending on the cancellation policy.

I’m earning gift cards, not cash back. The selection of gift cards typically includes around a hundred options, roughly a dozen of which are useful to me. Orders process quickly, but the most desirable gift cards often go out of stock, so I can’t always get the ones I want precisely when I want them. That adds friction to the rewards redemption process that wouldn’t exist with cash back.