By Tarran Street, on September 14, 2015

Introducing Travel with Points

We’ve done a lot lately to improve our Expedia+ rewards program for members. We revamped the program last year. We introduced our small business program at the start of summer. We rolled out more ways to earn and use your points. Now we’re pleased to introduce more enhancements: Expedia+ rewards members can redeem their points right from the hotel checkout page on Expedia.com, allowing you to Travel with Points.

Customers drove this change. We got a bunch of great feedback from our customers that the perks of our new loyalty program were pleasing, but that the process of redeeming points for coupons was a bit cumbersome. We tried to simplify that for our travelers by changing the structure we use to let customers redeem points. Now, instead of turning your points into a coupon, you can just book a hotel like you normally would, and when you get to the checkout page, you can choose the number of points in your account that you want to apply to your hotel cost.

If you have enough points, you could even cover the entire cost of your stay.

The best part of this update is that you’ll be able to apply other coupons you may have to your purchase. That means you can take advantage of additional deals while using your points. The other standard perks of our Expedia+ rewards program still apply, too—that means booking at a +VIP Access hotel will double the value of your points. With more than 1,600 hotels in the program +VIP Access program, you have a bunch of ways to save.

 

Curious about how the redeeming works? Check out the screenshot titled, “How would you like to pay?” So long as you have at least 3,500 points in your Expedia+ rewards account, you will see your points value (up to the total amount of the hotel) automatically selected to be deducted from your price. If you don’t want to use your points, you can choose to save them for later. If you choose only to pay for a portion of your hotel with points, you can do that too and you’ll still earn new points on the portion you pay for via credit card (or PayPal or Bitcoin). It’s worth noting that this feature currently only is available for our merchant hotels—those where Expedia collects the hotel payment at the time of booking.

Want more points? Be sure to follow @Expedia on Twitter. Starting Thursday, September 17, 2015, and continuing over the next few months, we’ll be posing questions as part of a massive Twitter giveaway. If you respond to our tweeted questions using the hashtag, #travelwithpoints, you’ll be entered to win! We’ll select a winner each month and will reward him or her with 100,000 Expedia+ points. Check out the full terms and conditions for more info.

We are looking forward to expanding the program in the future and will share more updates on our progress here. In the meantime, let us know what you think!