Hopper and Capital One Announce Long-Term Partnership to Develop a New Capital One Travel

Although last year was the most challenging year the travel industry has ever faced, our team at Hopper has never felt more confident in our future. 

Today, we’re pleased to share two major announcements. First, we’ll be partnering with Capital One to create the new and improved Capital One Travel, a brand-new, innovative customer booking experience built for Capital One cardholders. Secondly, we just closed a Series F round of $170 million led by Capital One, with participation from new and existing investors GS Growth, Inovia Capital, WestCap Group, and Citi Ventures. 

Partnership with Capital One

Capital One Travel, powered by Hopper, will launch in the second half of 2021 - at a time when travel is expected to make a return. The new portal will pair Hopper’s best-in-class technology and capabilities with Capital One’s customer-first, digital approach. Capital One Travel will offer a new and innovative way to book travel, including benefits designed specifically for cardholders as they get back to traveling later this year.

There will be more to share with the launch of the portal, but here are a few details to expect from the new and improved Capital One Travel:

• Best-in-class price prediction and alert technology, driven by Hopper’s AI-powered dynamic pricing and recommendations, will help protect customers from pricing volatility and ensure they get great value when booking flights, hotel, and rental cars.  

• At a time when people value flexibility in travel more than ever, Capital One Travel will offer unique products and servicing capabilities to help customers easily change or cancel their reservations.

• The portal will be seamlessly integrated into the Capital One rewards ecosystem, allowing customers to both earn and redeem rewards through this Hopper-powered platform, while also leveraging Capital One’s industry-leading mobile app and digital messaging capabilities. 

We’re thrilled that through this partnership, we can bring together two like-minded companies -- both are tech leaders in their respective industry, are focused on putting their customers first, and are pioneers in their use of big data. As travel begins to return, Capital One and Hopper are both focused on finding new ways to create best-in-class, intuitive solutions that make all parts of the travel journey seamless for their customers.

Hopper’s Growth in the Pandemic

This $170 million investment comes on the heels of what was a challenging year for us at Hopper, as well as the entire travel industry. Since quietly raising $70 million last spring, we focused entirely on executing the following objectives:

• Continuing to develop our world-class OTA by introducing new categories such as car rentals and alternate accommodations. 

• Investing heavily in customer support to address the unprecedented volume of requests. We built several fully automated in-app solutions so customers can directly manage their cancellations, changes, future travel credit (FTC) redemption, and insurance claims/resolutions. In the last two quarters, we’ve scaled our customer support team by 180%.

• Utilizing the company’s proprietary data and technology to offer unique AI-driven financial technology products, such as Price Freeze™ and Flexible Dates Plan, that offer Hopper app users peace-of-mind options

Thanks to the focus and tireless efforts of our team, we managed to have triple-digit revenue growth in 2020 despite all the challenges that the pandemic presented. This is largely due to our product innovation, as now more than ever, travelers want flexibility and more control over their itineraries.

Creating the most customer-centric travel marketplace via the Hopper app has always been a top priority, and Hopper is excited to announce that it will also be utilizing this new investment to launch Hopper Cloud, its new B2B initiative.

To our customers, we thank you for giving us the opportunity to build, collaborate, and invent. We can’t wait for everyone to travel again!