A new Hotels.com Amex Offer appeared last week which is giving 8% back on prepaid hotel bookings. Although the terms state that you have to use a specific URL, it might be possible to stack this with shopping portal earnings nonetheless.
The Deal
- Get 8% back as a statement credit when booking prepaid hotel stays at hotels.com/amex
Key Terms
- Expires July 7, 2025.
- Limit of $100 back in total statement credits.
- Offer valid for pre-paid hotel purchases made online through the hotels.com/amex link using the pre-paid option at checkout (“pay now”) only.
- Excludes “pay at property” purchases and purchases made over the phone.
- Excludes all other purchases not made at hotels.com/amex link using the pre-paid option at checkout.
- Use of third party cashback offers, promotion codes coupons, or browser extensions will invalidate this offer.
- Excludes gift cards, groups & meetings, vacation rentals/packages, and car rentals.
- American Express identifies qualifying transactions based on information provided by the participating merchant.
- Offer valid only on purchases made in US dollars.
Quick Thoughts
Back in the day, we used to see Amex Offers for Hotels.com that gave 20% back when buying their gift cards, plus there were sometimes sales elsewhere giving 10%-20% off their gift cards. Those deals are few and far between nowadays, plus earnings on stays were slashed from 10% to a miserly 2% a few years ago.
Saving 8% at Hotels.com is therefore a fairly good promotion if that’s your hotel booking site of choice, especially seeing as this Amex Offer is valid on up to $1,250 of spend.
A potential downside of this offer though is that it states that you have to book at hotels.com/amex:
Excludes all other purchases not made at hotels.com/amex link using the pre-paid option at checkout.
Despite those seemingly clear terms, I’m not certain that’ll be enforced. With some Amex Offers it’ll list a specific URL that you should use, but clicking through from a shopping portal to that retailer will still work to trigger the statement credit from the Amex Offer. This Hotels.com offer does give me pause though because after doing a hotel search from the Amex Offer landing page, it still displays an ‘Expedia Group Affiliate Program’ banner at the top of the page and so it’s still clearly differentiated from the regular Hotels.com site to an extent.
Having said that, I imagine that there’s a greater than zero chance of earning shopping portal rewards by either clicking through from a portal and booking a prepaid hotel on the regular Hotels.com website, or by clicking through from a portal and then changing the URL to hotels.com/amex.
It could be better to focus on the shopping portal regardless. For example, yesterday Rakuten was offering 10x. Earning 10x Membership Rewards or 10% cashback is preferable to earning only 8% back from the Amex Offer by booking directly from hotels.com/amex. Provided a high portal rate like that is available when you book, the way I’d play it would be to click through from a shopping portal, book a prepaid hotel and pay with my Amex card with the Amex Offer loaded to it without visiting the hotels.com/amex site at all. Seeing as the latter site specifically has ‘Expedia Group Affiliate Program’ listed at the top of the page, visiting that site after clicking through from a portal could effectively mean it steals the clickthrough from the shopping portal. Best case scenario you earn both the portal rewards and get 8% back on the Amex Offer; worst case you earn the higher portal rewards rather than only 8%.
Update: A few commenters have shared that they haven’t had success with stacking a portal when using a similar Expedia Amex Offer in the past. Hotels.com is owned by Expedia and so will likely be a similar situation, but fingers crossed that it does work if you try stacking the two.
However, it is important to book a prepaid rate no matter what. If you select to pay at the hotel, the Amex Offer statement credit definitely won’t track because the payment won’t have been taken by Hotels.com. Bear in mind though that prepaid doesn’t necessarily mean non-refundable. There might be prepaid rates that’ll trigger the Amex Offer but which can be cancelled for a full refund; you’ll have to check the terms before booking though.
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I’ve tried using the similar Amex Offer for Expedia in the past while clicking through a shopping portal and not using the Amex specific link and never got the statement credit from Amex
For the Expedia version of this offer previously, going through the Amex link added “AO” (Amex Offer) to the charge which is what Amex uses to determine eligibility. I tried making a booking that was partially paid with OneKeyCash and the “AO” did not appear, so I didn’t get a statement credit. When I rebooked it without OneKeyCash, it contained “AO” and I got the statement credit a few days later.
in my experience the Expedia 10% terms were enfrced and going through topcashback resulted in no amex offer. I even complained and got one rep to say that I was right and they still didn’t pay it. I prefer the B of A 5% discount which is taken at checkout over 8% maybe from Amex.
I agree with this