A bank is now America's sixth-biggest seller of travel
Chase Travel is the No. 6 seller of travel in the US on $12.6 billion in sales — and it sells travel by owning the loyalty currency travelers spend, not the inventory. When it quietly cut what those points are worth, it showed a control no OTA has.
When Travel Weekly published its 2026 Power List this week, the most telling change near the top wasn't a travel company at all. Chase Travel Group came in at No. 6, on $12.6 billion in 2025 sales, climbing a spot by stepping over CWT — the corporate-travel name that vanished into American Express Global Business Travel last year. A bank now sells more travel than all but five companies in the country.
It got there without owning a hotel, an airline, or a slice of inventory anyone else can't also sell. What JPMorgan Chase owns is the customer and the currency. That turns out to be the more valuable position.
(The Power List ranks gross sales, not revenue, so $12.6 billion is what flows through Chase Travel, not what Chase keeps. The placement is the point: a bank, sixth — above Navan, above Internova, one rung under the largest managed-travel groups in the world.)
The moat was never the inventory
Ask why a Sapphire cardholder books a hotel inside Chase Travel instead of on Booking.com. The room is identical either way. What differs is what the points are worth on each side of the wall.
A Chase Sapphire Reserve card earns 8x points booking through Chase Travel and 4x booking the same hotel direct. The points are then spent back through the portal. Earn faster inside, redeem inside — the currency is engineered to be worth more in Chase's own store than anywhere else a cardholder could carry it. Booking.com competes on price and selection, the open variables every OTA fights over in plain sight. Chase competes on something the OTA doesn't hold: what the customer's money is worth, and where it's worth the most.
That's not a loyalty perk bolted onto a card. It's a closed economy with one central bank.
The dial the issuer owns
Here is what owning the currency lets you do, and it came into plain view over the past six months.
In June 2025 Chase replaced the Sapphire Reserve's long-standing flat redemption — a fixed 1.5 cents per point through the portal — with Points Boost, a "dynamic" program promising up to 2 cents per point on select hotels and flights, and a flat 2x guaranteed at The Edit, its curated collection of more than 1,300 hotels. Boosted stays get a little rocket icon in the results and stack perks on top: breakfast for two, a $100 property credit. The pitch was more value.
By December the guarantee was gone. Chase changed the language from a flat 2x at The Edit to "up to 2x" — no email, no app alert, no notice inside the portal. A cardholder caught it on Reddit: the points cost of an Edit stay had risen while the cash price fell. The Points Guy tracked the same 150 Edit hotels over time and found the slide consistent — by spring, only 27% still redeemed at the full 2 cents, the rest cut to around 1.65. The flight floor dropped to 1.15 cents, below what those same cardholders got before Points Boost existed.
No OTA can do this. When Booking.com wants to move its margin, it adjusts a price the shopper sees and compares against three other tabs. When the bank wants to move its margin, it adjusts what its own currency is worth inside its own store — where there is no competing exchange rate and no tab to compare. The points sit in a Chase account. They spend best in Chase Travel. The rate is whatever Chase sets that week. Own both the money and the shop, and you can reprice the booking without the person booking it ever seeing the number change.
But the bank rents the pipe
For all that control at the top, Chase didn't build the machine underneath it. It assembled it.
Chase ran cxLoyalty as its booking engine years ago, switched to Expedia Partner Solutions in 2018, then bought cxLoyalty outright in 2020 and pulled fulfillment in-house. The backend now runs on a multi-year agreement with Travelport — a GDS — which means a hotel already connected through Travelport is reachable inside Chase Travel without lifting a finger. For advisor reach, Chase bought Frosch and folded in Valerie Wilson Travel, planting itself inside Signature and Virtuoso, the high-end agency networks it didn't have.
So the bank that out-booked CWT rents its pipe from a GDS and built its supply on rails an OTA helped lay. The infrastructure is the same infrastructure everyone uses. What Chase added on top is the part that's hard to copy: roughly a hundred million cardholders, a currency they already hold, and a reason to spend it here. The control is the relationship, not the plumbing — which is the connectivity argument read from the demand end. Whoever owns the readable inventory keeps a seat in the channel; whoever owns the customer and the currency decides where the channel points.
The pattern under the list
Chase isn't alone in the climb. American Express Travel rose to No. 7. CWT, one of the oldest names in managed travel, is gone, absorbed into Amex GBT. Read the movement and a rule appears: the companies gaining ground already own a customer and a payment relationship, and the one that disappeared sold travel for a living.
The scale frames how far this reaches. Booking Holdings tops the list at $186.1 billion, Expedia at $119.6 billion — then a cliff of nearly $100 billion to the third name. In that thinner air, the firms rising are issuers, not agencies.
For hotels, the shape is familiar in new dress. The booking arrives through an intermediary that sets the terms, takes its share, and owns the guest who walks in. What's new is that this intermediary also issued the card the guest pays with, runs the points they booked with, and can change what those points are worth between the search and the next trip. The hotel sells through a channel whose currency it doesn't set, can't watch being priced, and didn't know had moved.
by Markus Busch, Editor and Publisher of Hospitality.today
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