Building new products with Capital One Travel

When it came time for Sarah to book a trip to Portugal with her sister this year, she knew exactly where to go. As a business manager for Capital One’s travel team, Sarah helped create innovative travel solutions, like Capital One’s new travel portal, which she and her sister used to find great prices for their upcoming trip.

“We were on FaceTime, looking at the different flight prices with the portal pulled up,” Sarah said. “It was such a surreal full-circle moment of seeing this product I spent a lot of time working on being used by one of the most important people in my life.”

The Capital One Travel team has developed new products and expanded existing ones to offer Capital One customers a whole new way to travel.

Building new products

In 2020, Jamie, now the senior business director for Capital One Travel, was working on the Travel Rewards team leading the miles transfer program. He saw an opportunity to expand Capital One’s travel rewards program to offer top-of-the-line benefits and products.

“At the time, our travel portal was a little bit of an afterthought and not something that we heavily invested in,” Jamie said. “I started thinking about how we could revamp our portal and build it into a rewarding and marketable benefit for premium card holders.”

As he began developing his ideas, he started collaborating with Sarah, who was starting her career through Capital One’s Analyst Development Program, where recent college graduates jumpstart their career through two year long rotation placements. They worked with leaders across the team, including Jenn Scheurich, vice president of Capital One Travel & Retail Experience, to assist them in outlining the strategy behind the overhaul and refine their vision to focus on what travel products matter most to customers.

“The travel industry is very mature and established, so innovating in these places can be really challenging,” Jenn said. “We always want to push ourselves and ask, ‘How do we deliver towards where the world is going?’”

Empowered by strategy meetings with leaders like Jenn, Jamie and Sarah began researching the existing travel market to find a potential partner that matched Capital One’s commitment to innovation. At the top of their list was Hopper, a flight tracking company that uses predictive models to make the most accurate flight price predictions. The partnership with Hopper provided Capital One the technology to begin building out the new Capital One travel portal, which launched at the end of 2021.

Cindy, a manager of growth strategy, joined the team before launch. Her business analysis helped to bring the products to market and create a buzz around the exciting new features.

“It felt like working at a startup, given that we were basically building a product from the ground up,” Cindy said. “So it was really, really exciting. I was able to work at the intersection of product strategy and business analytics.”

The travel portal was just one of many innovations launched by the travel team. In November 2021, the team partnered closely with the team launching Venture X, which built upon the established Venture line of travel cards to offer premium travel rewards to luxury-minded travelers. 

Inspired by the success of Capital One Cafés, Jenn and her team planned the first