How Capital One Luxury Travel Balanced “Build vs. Buy” with Assembly
Capital One Luxury Travel combined the speed of Assembly’s off-the-shelf client portal software with the platform’s flexibility to support a custom solution for its hotel partner program.
Capital One Travel at Glance
Running on Assembly since
2023
Company URL
https://capitalonetravel.com/The Challenge: Scaling Onboarding and Partner Communications
Capital One Luxury Travel manages a growing global network of hotel partners who offer premium travel deals for Capital One cardholders. As the partner program grew to thousands of hotels, Capital One Luxury Travel saw an opportunity to elevate their hotel partners’ experience and streamline their program management with one solution.
Previously, onboarding a single hotel partner could take between 50 and 60 days, according to the team.
“Before Assembly, we were managing hotel partners through Google spreadsheets and long email chains,” said Phillip LaRue, Senior Director of Luxury Travel at Capital One. “It became hard to scale and created friction for everyone.”
The Luxury Travel team looked to create a new product that could give a branded experience to hotel partners and improve the program’s management. In doing so, they encountered a common dilemma for innovative teams at large enterprises: was it worth investing in building in-house solutions or buying an out-of-the box solution?
The answer: Assembly, which allowed Capital One Luxury Travel to get the best of both worlds.
Beyond “Build vs. Buy” with Assembly: Faster, Custom Client Experiences
The top considerations for the Capital One Luxury Travel team would normally suggest a time-consuming in-house solution: from the ability to ensure consistent branding for their hotel partners, the flexibility to integrate to their existing approval flows, and having a single place for communication and information sharing for both the internal team and the hotel partners.
But the team found that Assembly’s client portal software gave them all the flexibility they needed in an out-of-the-box solution and the speed of custom development with Assembly’s expert developer ecosystem to give their hotel partners a better experience without months of development.
Using Assembly’s platform, the team implemented a secure, white-labeled portal branded for Capital One Luxury Travel hotel partners. The portal gave their clients a seamless onboarding experience, including:
Custom onboarding forms, with review and approval flows
Client messaging, secure document and form-sharing
Embedded training modules to ensure hotel staff completed compliance requirements
Automated notifications and reminders, reducing manual follow-up
This hybrid approach allowed Capital One Luxury Travel to launch quickly while still developing and tailoring its portal to its program’s requirements, without disrupting the hotel’s client experience.
Results: Actionable Process Change Externally and Internally
Within two years since launching their custom portal, Capital One Luxury Travel has:
Scaled from hundreds to more than 1,100 hotel partners.
Cut onboarding times from 60 days to around 30 days, with more improvements on the way.
Centralized hotel partner engagement — onboarding, training, communications, and resources — into one branded hub.
What’s more, Capital One Luxury Travel was also able to expand the benefits of their partner portal back to the team’s internal processes. The team found an opportunity to build a second portal that connected their partner-provided data to their internal quality assurance and compliance review program.
“What excites me is how our partner data collected in Assembly flows directly into our internal quality control processes. Instead of duplicating work across systems, everything is connected, saving our team time and ensuring we always have the most accurate, up-to-date information.”
— Phillip LaRue, Sr. Director of Luxury Travel at Capital One
The opportunities to leverage partner-provided data to enrich everything from internal team processes to potential customer-facing traveler experiences means that with Assembly, Capital One Luxury Travel didn’t have to choose between building or buying. They did both — and created a scalable foundation for their Luxury Travel program.
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