Uber pays it in ride credits. Robinhood pays it through a $695 credit card. Airbnb pays up to 15% on the hotels it features. Ten percent back on a hotel booking — once the signature offer of online travel agencies — has migrated to companies whose core business isn't hotels at all.

The latest entrant arrived last week, when Robinhood announced a partnership with Duffel, the London travel-technology company that powers flights, hotels and car rentals inside the Robinhood app. Platinum cardholders earn 10% back on hotels and car rentals, and 5% on flights. Gold cardholders earn 3%.

That's the whole point, of course. The rewards aren't a travel product. They're a retention product.

Who's actually paying for the 10%?

The companies now offering double-digit hotel cashback — a brokerage app, a ride-hailing giant, a short-term rental platform — make their money somewhere other than hotel bookings. For them, 10% back is a customer-acquisition and card-engagement cost, not a margin sacrifice on their core P&L.

Compare that with the companies whose core business is hotel bookings. Hotels.com once gave customers a free night after every ten paid nights — roughly a 10% rebate, funded directly from its agency economics. Expedia Group retired that mechanic in the U.S. in July 2023, replacing it with One Key, its cross-brand loyalty program. The free Blue tier of One Key now earns members 1% back on hotels, effective July 28, 2026.

The delta is stark. The people who sell hotels for a living now pay a tenth of what the people who don't sell hotels for a living are paying.

What does this mean for distribution?

The pattern matters for anyone selling hotel inventory. When a fintech app can attach travel booking and fund double-digit rebates from interchange or brokerage revenue, the traditional agency commission pool stops being the only currency in the market. Distribution gets cross-subsidized.

That squeezes the incumbent OTAs (online travel agencies, the intermediaries selling hotel rooms on commission) from an unfamiliar direction. They can't easily match 10% across a loyalty tier without cannibalizing take rates. Expedia's move to a 1% Blue-tier rebate is, read plainly, a quiet admission that funded generosity at the old scale no longer pencils.

Duffel's position is worth watching too. The London company supplies the plumbing — flights, hotels, cars — while Robinhood owns the customer and the brand moment. That's a classic division of labor in embedded travel (travel booking placed inside a non-travel app), and it shifts the seller-of-record question further away from the companies with the deepest hotel supply relationships.

The verdict

Ten percent back used to be what a travel company gave you. Now it's what a travel-adjacent company gives you to keep you from leaving its app. Expect more of it — and expect the OTAs' loyalty programs to keep shrinking into the gap their new competitors can afford to bridge.

By Daniel Okafor