Chase Travel Is Growing as Fast as Booking Holdings But Faces ‘Headwinds’

Skift Take

If a soft economy is causing luxury travelers to limit their discretionary spending, that’s sour news for Chase Travel in the short term. But over the long term, Chase Travel and some of its banking peers are trending upwards in travel.

Dennis Schaal

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.”

What the Numbers Say

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.

2023 Gross Bookings and Percentage Increase

Source: Company filings/Skift

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.

What Else Did Chase Travel Do in 2023 and 2024?

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 premium hotel collection called The Edit, which now has 800 properties.

In late 2023, it began enabling cardholders to book Southwest’s leisure fares with points or cash — and that’s something that no other credit card companies or online travel agencies have announced they can do. Google Flights began displaying Southwest’s flights for the first time this week. Southwest is one of the largest domestic airlines in the U.S.

Among other data points that Chase Travel released this week:

• Its bookings increased 12% in the first quarter year over year;

• Chase Travel attracted 3.5 million unique customers, a 19% jump, and they booked 9 million trips in 2023.