Rakuten roughly doubled cash back across travel for August 2026, and the biggest rates landed on the experience stores: Viator at 14%, Go City and SIXT at 10%, Groupon up to 10%. Good timing for a summer trip with kids. The catch is that "up to 8%" on Expedia, Booking.com and Priceline is the hotel rate, flights pay a flat $1 to $2, and travel cash back only pays after you travel.
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The short version: Rakuten roughly doubled its cash back across travel for August. The biggest jumps are not on flights or hotels, they are on the experience stores: Viator at 14% (usually 2%), Go City passes and SIXT rental cars at 10%, Groupon up to 10%, Tripadvisor at 8%. That is convenient timing if you have a summer trip with kids and a list of things to book. Two catches worth knowing before you click. On Expedia, Booking.com and Priceline, that "up to 8%" is the hotel rate, and flights pay a flat $1 to $2, not a percentage. And travel cash back only pays out after you take the trip, so an August booking lands in November, not on the August 15 payment date. The event runs August 1 through August 7.
Summer is the season you spend money on your kids whether you planned to or not. The aquarium, the zip line, the boat that promises dolphins and delivers three seagulls. If those bookings are happening anyway, routing them through Rakuten first is a couple of clicks for real money back, and right now the rates on exactly that category are the highest on the site.
Rakuten calls it Travel Week, and its email to members puts the window plainly: "Welcome to Travel Week; August 1 -7; Get extra Cash Back on flights, hotels, experiences and beyond." So it runs August 1 through August 7. If you are reading this the day it went up, you have days, not weeks.
One practical warning about that deadline. The website never shows it. We checked the travel category page, the promotions hub, and the individual store pages, first with a plain fetch and then again in a full browser in case a countdown was being drawn by JavaScript. There is no end date, no countdown, and no "ends" language on any of them. The date exists in the email and nowhere else, so if you did not get the email there is nothing on the site to check against. Elevated rates also get pulled early sometimes, regardless of the stated window. So do not trust a date, ours included. Open the store page and confirm the rate is still showing before you book. It takes five seconds and it is the only thing that actually proves the offer is live.
Every rate below is from our own store tracker, scraped this morning and confirmed against Rakuten's travel page the same day.
| Store | What it sells | Now | Usually |
|---|---|---|---|
| Viator | Day tours, cooking classes, boat trips | 14% | 2% |
| Go City Card | Bundled passes to city attractions | 10% | 2% |
| SIXT rent the car | Rental cars | 10% | 4% |
| Groupon | Local activities and day trips | Up to 10% | 2% |
| Hotels.com | Hotels | Up to 9% | 1% |
| Tripadvisor | Hotels and things to do | 8% | 4% |
| Expedia | Hotels, flights, cars, packages | Up to 8% | 3% |
| Priceline | Hotels, flights, cars | Up to 8% | 4% |
| Booking.com | Hotels and apartments | Up to 8% | 4% |
| Vrbo | Whole-home vacation rentals | 6% | 1% |
| IHG Hotels & Resorts | Holiday Inn, Kimpton, and their sister brands | 6% | 3% |
| Agoda | Hotels, strongest in Asia | 6% | 3% |
| ResortPass | Day passes to hotel pools and spas | 4% | 2% |
| Celebrity Cruises | Cruises | 4% | 2% |
Viator going from 2% to 14% is the standout, and it is a flat rate rather than an "up to" number. Go City and Vrbo are the other big multiples, both up from very little.
This is the part that decides whether the big booking sites are worth routing through, and it is easy to miss because the headline number is the only one on the category page. Each store page breaks the rate down by what you are buying, and the spread is enormous.
| Store | Hotels | Cars | Flights |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expedia | 8% | 1% | $1.25 flat |
| Booking.com | 8% | 3% prepaid, 2% pay at pickup | $1 flat |
| Priceline | 8% | 4% | $2 flat |
Read the flights column again. Not 1%. One dollar. Book a $1,600 set of family flights on Expedia through Rakuten and you earn $1.25, which is roughly the value of the click it took you. Expedia also pays its full 8% on "Things to Do," and Groupon's 10% drops to 6% on things to do outside its main cities.
This is worth flagging because Rakuten's own Travel Week email leads with "extra Cash Back on flights, hotels, experiences and beyond," and flights are the one thing on that list where the money is a rounding error. The headline is not wrong, exactly. The flight tier is just a fixed handful of change, and nothing in the email tells you that.
So the practical rule for this event: route the hotel, the car, and the activities through Rakuten. Do not bother routing flights. Book those wherever earns you the most on your card, or direct with the airline where changes are easier.
Say you already have a week booked somewhere warm in late August, and here is what is left to pay for. These are round numbers to show the math, not quoted prices.
| What you book | Where | Spend | Rate | Back |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 nights, hotel | Expedia (hotels tier) | $1,200 | 8% | $96 |
| Two day tours | Viator | $450 | 14% | $63 |
| Attraction passes | Go City | $400 | 10% | $40 |
| Rental car, one week | SIXT | $300 | 10% | $30 |
| Total | $2,350 | $229 |
That is about 9.7% back on money that was leaving your account either way. Pay with a flat 2% card and you add roughly $47 on top, which takes the trip to about $276 back, or 11.7%.
Now add $1,600 of flights on Expedia to that same basket. Your cash back goes up by $1.25. The flights are the biggest line on the trip and they contribute almost nothing, which is exactly why the breakdown above matters more than the headline rate.
Two stores on the list are worth knowing about if you have not used them. ResortPass at 4% sells day passes to hotel pools and spas, which is a genuinely good trick for the dead afternoon between a checkout and a late flight, or for a staycation day when you are not traveling at all. Go City at 10% bundles a city's attractions into one pass, and 10% back on a family-sized pass is real money.
This is the single most misunderstood thing about travel cash back, and for a family booking summer plans it changes the arithmetic completely.
Rakuten's Viator page states it plainly: cash back is added to your account "within a couple of weeks after travel has been completed." Expedia's page says "within a week after travel has been completed." You are not paid when you book. You are paid after you go, and only if you go. Cancel the tour and the cash back cancels with it.
Then there is the payment calendar. Rakuten pays out quarterly on February 15, May 15, August 15, and November 15, and you need at least $5.01 in confirmed cash back before a payment date to get paid at all. So a trip you book this week and take in late August will not be confirmed in time for the August 15 payment. Realistically that money reaches you in November.
Plan around that. This is money that shows up after the trip is over and the credit card bill has already been paid. It is a nice thing to find in November. It is not part of your travel budget.
One upside on the payout method: Rakuten will pay you as a check or through PayPal, but it can also pay out as American Express Membership Rewards points or as Bilt points instead of cash. If you are collecting points rather than dollars, that is worth setting before the payout lands. We walked through the points version of this in our Viator piece from July.
Here is something that confuses people the first time they see it. If you have switched your Rakuten payout to American Express Membership Rewards points, Rakuten stops showing you percentages entirely. Every rate on the site and in the emails is rendered as a points multiple instead. Viator is not "14% Cash Back," it is "14X Points," with "was 2X" beside it.
The numbers are the same offer wearing different clothes. 14X means 14 points per dollar spent, which is the same earning as 14% back. Where it gets easier to see is the fixed-dollar offers: the CheapOair promotion in this same event reads "Up to $30 Cash Back, was $15" on the cash side and "Up to 3,000 Points, was 1,500" on the points side. That is 100 points for every dollar of cash back, in both directions.
So the entire table above still applies to you, just multiply rather than percent. What actually changes is whether you want it. A dollar of cash back is worth a dollar. Whether 100 Membership Rewards points beats that depends on what you do with them, and that is your call to make, not a number Rakuten can print. If you are going to transfer them to an airline for a premium seat, points win comfortably. If they will sit in the account for two years, take the cash.
Rakuten cash back is separate from your credit card rewards. You click through Rakuten, pay with whatever card you would have used anyway, and both pay out. No specific card is required.
There is a trap here that catches people, though. A card's big travel bonus usually applies to its own booking portal, not to the whole internet. The Capital One Venture X Rewards (annual fee $395) earns 10x on hotels and cars, but only when you book inside Capital One Travel. Book that same hotel on Expedia so you can collect the Rakuten 8%, and the card drops to its 2x everything rate.
So the honest comparison is Rakuten's 8% plus 2% on your card, against roughly 10x points inside the card's own portal. Which wins depends on what you think the points are worth and whether the portal price matches. Run it for the specific booking rather than assuming.
For the activity stores there is no such conflict, because no card portal sells Viator tours. A flat everything card is the safe pick since a day tour will not reliably code as travel. The Wells Fargo Active Cash Card (no annual fee) pays 2% on everything, and Citi Double Cash (no annual fee) pays 2% (1% buy + 1% pay). Either sits neatly on top of a 14% Rakuten rate.
One thing to avoid: do not stack a card-linked offer on a Rakuten purchase. Several stores void cash back entirely if you use one, and a $10 card offer that kills $63 of cash back is a bad trade.
14% on Viator is good, but it is not the best we have seen. We covered Viator at 20% on July 22, and our tracker caught it stepping down to 14% on August 1. So this is a strong rate and a bad reason to panic. If your booking can wait and you are willing to watch, Viator has gone higher inside the last month.
None of this is a reason to book something you were not going to book. A 14% rate on a $450 tour you did not want is not a $63 win, it is a $387 loss. The entire case for portal cash back rests on the purchase already being decided.
A few things quietly kill payouts, and they are worth thirty seconds of care:
If you want the full mechanics of clicking through correctly, what breaks tracking, and how to file a missing cash back claim, our Rakuten stacking guide covers all of it.
Rakuten is free to join and none of the rates above depend on how you signed up. If you are starting from scratch, joining through our referral link is worth more than signing up cold (referral link, we get a bonus too). As of today it pays a $50 bonus once you spend $50, against the $10 bonus Rakuten was advertising on its own homepage the same day for a plain signup.
The terms, straight off Rakuten's page, because a couple of them catch people out:
One honest note on timing. The bonus rides the same quarterly calendar as everything else, so it arrives on a payment date rather than the day you qualify. If your $50 is a summer trip you have not taken yet, remember travel only confirms after you travel, so realistically you are looking at the November payment.
cards table for all annual fee and earn rate figuresRates and terms are Rakuten's to change without notice. Not financial advice.