Turning card data intoa hospitality experience.

Points were the product.

For years, premium credit card rewards operated on a single, tired mechanic: spend money, accumulate points, redeem points. The value exchange was transactional by design. You swiped, you earned, you eventually clicked through a portal and booked something.

Chase knew the ceiling on this model. Their Sapphire cardholders were spending $5,000 a month or more, staying in hotels 40+ nights a year, eating at fine dining restaurants twice a week. These were not people motivated by points. They were people who wanted to feel recognised.

The existing travel experience for a Sapphire cardholder looked like this: book a hotel through the Ultimate Rewards portal, receive a generic confirmation email, arrive at the hotel as a complete stranger. The hotel had no idea who you were, what you liked, or why you were there. Chase had all of that information and no way to put it to work.

Innovating Hospitality, and the workstream inside it.

In 2014, Chase came to us with an initiative called Innovating Hospitality, structured across three workstreams: Ultimate Rewards (integrating card value with the broader rewards ecosystem), Sapphire Dining (inserting Chase into meaningful dining experiences), and Hotel Rewards (enhancing the hotel stay for Sapphire cardholders). I led the Hotel Rewards workstream.

The brief had two layers. The first was strategic: could we design a new value exchange that went beyond the standard convention of awarding points for transactions? The second was practical: deliver a functional prototype within ten weeks that could initiate and run a pilot programme with participating hotels.

A crowded field

We were entering highly contested space. TripIt, TripAdvisor, TripCase and Concur were all fighting for the same real estate on the business traveller's phone. American Express was already ahead of the field with its concierge services. The question was not whether Chase could build a travel app. It was whether Chase could build something neither travel apps nor rival card products could match: an experience that used transactional data to create something personal.

Designing for two users who never meet the same screen.

The first decision was about scope. It would have been possible, and much easier, to design a better booking and itinerary experience for the cardholder and call it done. We argued against it. A better booking flow does not change the moment that actually matters, which is arrival: the point at which a valuable customer walks into a hotel and is treated as an anonymous reservation.

That meant the product had to be two-sided.

Trust architecture as a design surface

The same underlying data had to serve both sides while feeling legitimate to each. Getting the cardholder experience right was not sufficient if the hotel dashboard failed to give staff something they could act on the moment a guest walked in. Equally, any staff-facing feature that made the cardholder feel tracked would have destroyed the proposition entirely.

Ten weeks, working backwards from the pilot

The timeline was not negotiable, so scope was managed against it continuously. We designed to what could realistically be stood up with participating hotel partners rather than to an unconstrained concept, which kept the prototype credible as an operational pilot rather than a showcase.

A bridge between two existing relationships.

Two mechanisms make it work, and neither is a screen.

Turning spend into a guest profile

The translation is the heart of it. Category and merchant spend, travel preferences and location history on the Chase side become something a hotel can read at a glance: a luxury traveller, married, no children, who enjoys fine dining, Italian, Japanese and golf, trending trendy and technophile.

What the cardholder gets

Preferences collected at onboarding and from Ultimate Rewards travel are selected by default, and the app suggests common guest requests the partner hotel can accommodate. Recognition arrives before you do.

What the hotel sees

Staff get the guest’s travel-related spending habits, the purpose of the stay and any special requests, plus recommended upgrades drawn from the hotel’s own inventory. Arrival is flagged the moment the guest lands.

The result was the first initiative of its kind in premium card rewards: a two-sided product built on a dataset the industry already had and had never known how to use.

The interesting problems in financial services are relationship problems.

The two-sided design problem was hard. Most consumer products have one primary user. This one had two users with fundamentally different goals who needed to be served simultaneously by the same underlying data, with a trust architecture that worked for both.

Looking back, I would have pushed harder to get live hotel partners into the research phase earlier. We designed the hotel dashboard with a good understanding of what Chase needed, but with limited direct input from hotel operations teams about how they actually process guest intelligence at the front desk during check-in. Getting that earlier would have sharpened the information hierarchy on the staff-facing side.