How Expedia’s OneKeyCash rewards program is a giant scam

As a digital nomad, I travel often. I’ve been using Expedia to book flights and hotels for more than 10 years. Recently they’ve changed their rewards program to something called “OneKeyCash” — you get some virtual USD in rewards after you book (or complete? it’s not clear) a trip. The amount is very small, less than 0.5% in most cases. For a $383 flight, I got $0.74, for example.

Here’s the problem with this OneKeyCash: you can’t really USE these rewards! This is for 2 reasons:

1 — You must pay with OneKeyCash the whole reservation!

When you make a reservation, you can’t apply the OneKeyCash “dollars” to the price you pay for it. Your OneKeyCash amount must cover the entire cost of the reservation. So you must book and book and book and accummulated OneKeyCash until you can finally use to book the cheapest hotel (and then you’re left with some unusable remainder until you repeat the process).

2 — You basically can’t book flights with OneKeyCash!

After I managed to accrue $213 in OneKeyCash, I tried to use that to book a flight. But… surprise — on the checkout page, there was no option to use OneKeyCash! So I asked customer service, and was told this:

Indeed, if you want to buy the refundable option for a flight, you tpically need to pay more than double. Here’s an example flight that costs $213:

I don’t need refundable, but whatever. Let’s see what the cheapest REFUNDABLE option is:

Okay, so for a $213 flight, the cheapest refundable option is $514! That’s MORE THAN DOUBLE! This means that I need accumulate $300 more to buy this flight with OneKeyCash. At a 0.5% rewards rate, that means I need to spend $60,000 (!!!).

Sorry Expedia, but your rewards program can fuck off.

Trip.com offers 1% rewards, and they can be applied to discount ANY reservation.