Chase Travel: Connected

Goal

Reposition the travel vertical from a commodity booking utility into a differentiated platform that drives card retention, premium spend, and lifestyle value for the portfolio.

Problem

The travel portal was a commodity — functionally equivalent to any OTA, with no expression of card value. Premium cardholders saw the same experience as entry-level. In a market where every major card issuer competes on travel, undifferentiated booking drives price-comparison behavior and weakens the retention case for premium annual fees.

Internally, dozens of teams were shipping against fragmented backlogs with no shared product vision. The gap wasn't execution quality — it was strategic alignment across a complex organization.

Customer Promise

"Every booking reflects who you are as a cardmember — not just where you're going."

Constraints

• Tech: Legacy booking infrastructure with multi-vendor backend. No greenfield option.
• Partner: Multiple vendor relationships with different integration contracts.
• Compliance: Financial services regulatory requirements on pricing transparency.
• Time: Phased delivery across quarterly release trains.

Options Considered

1. Option A: Incremental UI refresh on existing architecture. Low risk, low differentiation.
2. Option B: Experience rewrite — new IA, personalized surfaces, card-tier-aware content. Higher risk, real differentiation.
3. Option C: Full platform rebuild. Maximum differentiation but multi-year timeline.

Decision

Option B. Rewrite the experience layer while the backend migrates underneath. Prioritize surfaces that express card value — search, trip detail, confirmation — over back-office flows.

This created a parallel execution model: experience transformation and infrastructure migration proceeding simultaneously without blocking each other. Higher coordination cost, but the business couldn't wait for a sequential approach.

Metrics

• Primary: Booking conversion — the throughput signal that the experience was earning trust.
• Guardrails: NPS stability, error rate, accessibility compliance — ensuring transformation didn't trade quality for speed.
• Strategic: Card-tier differentiation across the travel vertical — the portfolio signal that premium value was being expressed.

Risks & Mitigations

• Parallel migration risk → Mitigation: abstraction layer between experience and infrastructure allowed both workstreams to ship independently.
• Cross-team fragmentation at scale → Mitigation: embedded product leadership in each pod with a shared system of record for quality and consistency.

What Changed

• A fragmented organization aligned to a single product vision — dozens of teams shipping against shared outcomes instead of isolated backlogs.
• A commodity booking portal became a card-tier-aware platform that expresses premium value at every touchpoint.
• A parallel execution model proved that experience transformation and infrastructure migration don't have to be sequential.
• A product organization built from scratch with the craft standards and cross-functional operating model to sustain it — left on a clear pathway toward integration maturity and operational efficiency.