In this guide, we will walk you through the Capital One Travel portal to help you make the most of your earned bonuses and other useful features of the portal.
We will also cover the basics of Capital One Travel.
Capital One has gained popularity because of its offerings to its cardholders.
Some of its outstanding offerings include special treatment at airports, partnerships with a huge list of travel partners, and a reward program for customers via a special credit card.
Another thing that makes Capital One shine is its revamped travel portal. If you have visited the Capital One Travel portal lately, you will notice that the newly improved interface lets card holders search for rewards and thereafter pay their travel expenses using the rewards.
In other words, you can use your earned miles to pay for flights, car hire, and accommodation.
Even if you prefer paying out-of-pocket instead of using miles to book travel, you can still take advantage of the cards that award bonus miles on Capital One Travel portal purchases.
Besides this, there are a few bells and whistles, such as price watch, price prediction, price match guarantee, price drop detection, and the ability to cancel books for any reason. It also has several downsides.
So, What is Capital One Travel?
This is one of the most impressive travel portals out there. It is powered by Hopper and offers attractive prices and discounts to members.
It also offers exclusive access to several flights, hotels, and car rental packages around the world. And the best thing is that cardholders can earn points or bonuses and be able to use them to cater for travel expenditures.
In addition to the above, the Capital One Travel portal provides useful tools like price drop protection, which refunds the fare difference if prices drop after booking, as well as a price calendar to help users find the cheapest flight tickets.
Moreover, the portal comes with a price freeze feature, which helps cardholders freeze flight prices for up to 2,500 miles or $25.
Which Cards Make You Eligible for the Capital One Travel Portal?
The Capital One Travel portal is available for several categories of users, mainly US cardholders of Capital One rewards cards.
This means that you don’t necessarily need a pricey travel card to be eligible for a travel portal.
There are over a dozen options available for these cardholders. So, if you have one of the following Capital One cards, you qualify to use the portal:
- Capital One Sparks Miles for Business
- Capital One VentureOne Rewards Credit Card
- Capital One Sparks Miles Select for Business
- Capital One Quicksilver Cash Rewards Credit Card
- Capital One Venture X Reward Credit Card
- Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card
- Capital One QuicksilverOne Cash Rewards Credit Card
- Capital One Savor Cash Rewards Credit Card
- Capital One SavorOne Cash Rewards Credit Card
- Capital One Quicksilver Student Cash Rewards Credit Card
- Capital One Quicksilver Secured Cash Rewards Credit Card
- Capital One Spark Cash Plus
- Capital One Spark 1% Classic
- Capital One Spark Cash Select for Excellent Credit
- Capital One Walmart Rewards Mastercard
- Capital One Spark Cash Select: $500 Cash Bonus
- Journey Student Rewards from Capital One
Why You Should Use Capital One Travel
There are several benefits that cardholders can get from using the Capital One Travel portal. Let’s use Capital One Venture X Business and Capital One Venture X as examples:
The cards offer reward miles on Capital One Travel purchases. Specifically, you earn 5x for flight bookings and 10x for rental car and hotel bookings.
If we value Capital One miles at 1.7 cents each, you will get something like an 8.5–17% return on investment for Capital One Travel purchases.
The cards also offer a $300 annual travel credit for every purchase through the Capital One Travel portal. Besides this, the cards offer 10,000 reward miles on your account anniversary each year.
The good thing is that the bonus can be redeemed via Capital One Travel, among other ways.
Key Features and Benefits of the Portal
Here are a few features and benefits that users of the Capital One Travel portal can take advantage of. These features are what you will find with the top travel search engines:
1. Price Prediction Technology
This feature allows users to get the best pricing for flights by advising them on when to book their flights. Due to the massive amount of data that the issue collects, it is able to price flight with 95% accuracy.
2. Price Alerts on Flights
If you have some flights that you would like to watch, the portal allows you to set price alerts for those flights and advise on the best time to book.
3. Price Drop Prediction
If the price prediction tool advises on the best time to book a flight ticket but the price drops after purchasing the ticket, the portal can refund you part of the price difference. This is, however, pegged to the terms of your bookings.
4. Best Price Match Guarantee
Similar to price drop prediction, the Capital One Travel portal will refund you the difference in the price of a hotel, flight, or rental car if you can find a better offer online within 24 hours of booking with the portal.
5. Cancel for Any Reason Coverage
This is one of the most useful features for any traveler. For a small fee, you can cancel your flight for any reason within 24 hours prior to your scheduled flight departure.
6. Price Freeze
If you are not yet ready to book your flight, the portal allows you to pay a small fee for flight price freezing until you are ready to complete the booking.
Travel Bookings with Capital One Travel
The Capital One travel portal is easy to use. All you do is visit travel.capitalone.com and sign in with your credentials.
After that, you can choose between booking a flight, a rental cab, or a hotel, and then key in your destination and specific travel dates, which give you a list of options.
The Capital One Travel portal allows you to stay in over 2 million hotels around the world, book flights on over 200 airlines, and rent cars with almost 200 rental car providers.
But before you book anything, it is always recommended to check the travel offers section just beneath the flight, hotel, or rental car tabs.
Here, you will get some travel credits for select target markets. So, if you make a qualifying booking, you will earn travel credits that you can use in future bookings.
Let’s now look at how to book hotels, flights, and rental cars on the Capital One Travel portal:
1. Booking Flights Through the Capital One Travel Portal
You can book both domestic and international flights on the portal by going to the flights tab and entering your travel details, like destination, departure location, travel dates, and the number of people traveling. You can either book a one-way or return flight.
The provided color-coded price calendar will help you when choosing the travel dates. You will easily identify the least expensive and most expensive dates.
After selecting your departure and return dates on the calendar, click Done. After that, click on the Search Flights button to get the search results. From here, you can filter the results by stops, fare class, time, airline, and price.
2. Booking Hotels via the Capital One Travel Portal
The way you book hotels using the Capital One Travel portal is almost similar to the way you book flights on the platform.
What you need to do is click on the Hotels tab and feed it with the relevant details. After that, you click Search Hotels.
While the hotel search tool doesn’t have a price calendar, it has a city map that helps you narrow down your options to find the best rates.
You can also filter the hotel search results by amenities, star rating, and price. Once you have selected the rate and your room, you will be directed to the checkout page, where you will choose to pay by the cash rate or just redeem miles.
3. Booking Car Rentals Through the Capital One Travel Portal
The process of booking rental cars using the portal starts by selecting the Rental Cars tab and entering the drop-off and pick-up locations, times for pick-up and drop-off, rental dates, and driver age.
Note that drivers under the age of 25 may be subject to additional fees. When you are done, click Search Cars.
On the search results page, you can filter the information by price per day, vehicle type, rental car company, and cancellation policy, among other variables. As with hotels and flights, you will have the option of going with the cash rate or the mileage redemption rate.
Parting Shot: Should You Use Capital One Travel for Your Travel Bookings?
Many travel credit card issuers are offering some sort of feature-rich travel portal to improve your travel experience.
Capital One Travel, specifically, allows its cardholders to use their rewards efficiently while booking accommodations.
So, if you are a Capital One Travel cardholder, you may take advantage of the many features and efficiencies offered by the portal.
However, when it comes to choosing your travel portal, your goals should be the main deciding factor.
If you have accrued miles in your travel accounts and are looking forward to using them, or if you love to earn bonuses on travel booked through the Capital One Travel portal, then you should consider using this portal.
You might also like the Capital One Travel portal because of the boosted reward value for transfers to a travel partner.
On the downside, you might not like this portal because of the lack of travel packages. The only way to circumvent this shortcoming is to group different types of travel accommodations into a single itinerary and then pay for them all at once.
Another shortcoming of Capital One Travel is that it doesn’t allow you to take advantage of any hotel elite status that you may have earned.
Also, remember to do some basic research on prices before using any travel port to book accommodations or flights.
Even if Capital One Travel is your go-to site, you still need to make sure you are getting the best deal.
Also Read:
- The Complete Guide to the Capital One Travel Portal for 2024
- The Top 30 Digital Nomad Hotels Worldwide
