A charge from EXPEDIA on your statement

EXPEDIA on a card statement is a booking made through Expedia, the travel agency. It is a booking, not a software subscription. The charge is for a flight, a hotel, a car, a package or an activity, and it can appear weeks before the trip: for some hotel rates Expedia charges the card before the stay, not when the booking is made.¹ The number printed after the name is the part that finds the booking.

What it looks like on a real statement

Delaware publishes every purchase made on its employees’ cards with the merchant name as the bank received it. These are lines from that file, copied as printed.⁷ They are public purchase-card lines, not one person’s account, but they show every shape the name takes.

The number is what changed

In Delaware’s file there are 1,371 lines whose merchant name begins EXPEDIA, from 28 June 2014 to 26 September 2026. The name has changed shape several times, and the number is the part that carries the booking.⁷

One more line, from 7 August 2014, reads EXPEDIA*EXPEDIA*182101 and is for $14.00; the table above accounts for the other 1,370.

Every one of the 663 lines with a 14-digit number, and every one of the 424 with a 13-digit number, starts with 7. Expedia’s help page says the confirmation email contains the itinerary number, and that a booking can be found from it without signing in.⁵ In this file the name is cut at 22 characters. EXPEDIA plus a space is 8 characters, and a 14-digit number is 14, so the full number fits at exactly 22; all 663 of the 14-digit lines are 22 characters long, and 541 other lines are 21. A bank that prints fewer characters may cut the number short, which is why the last digits are worth checking against the confirmation email.

One itinerary number does not mean one line. In the file, 107 of the 535 14-digit numbers appear on more than one line, one of them five times. The data does not say why, and Expedia gives several reasons a booking produces more than one charge: a roundtrip bought as two one-way fares is charged by the airline segment by segment; a package can show separate charges for the flight and the hotel on the statement even when the receipt shows one total; a hotel booked with “Reserve now, pay later” is charged before the stay; and extras added at the hotel are charged after check-out.¹⁶

Refunds look the same way: 97 of the 1,371 lines are credits, together −$34,236.80. One booking can come back in pieces. On 29 May 2025 a Delaware office was charged $220.56 under EXPEDIA 73122003647205; on 20 July 2025 the same number came back as four credits of $30.00, $135.42, $45.14 and $10.00. Of the 97 credits, 41 match an earlier charge of the same amount in the same office within a year; half of those arrived within 11 days, 20 within 10 days, and the slowest took 118 days.⁷

Why there may be more than one charge

Expedia’s own “Unrecognized charges” page lists the cases it says produce a line you do not expect. These are its words, not our explanation of your account:¹

• A change to the booking: the airline, hotel, car rental company or activity provider may charge a fee, and Expedia passes it on.
• A “Pay Later” hotel booking: the property may put a hold on the card or take an early deposit before check-in, and Expedia says to contact the property for a claim or refund.
• A “Reserve now, pay later” hotel booking: Expedia charges the card on a set date before the stay, not when the booking is made.
• A card issued outside the country, or a booking made from outside it: an international transaction fee may be added.
• Spending at the hotel: minibar, wifi and other room charges can post after check-out; a no-show, a late check-out or arriving outside check-in hours can also produce a fee.
• A roundtrip bought as two one-way fares: “you will see multiple charges on your billing statement, as each segment will be charged separately by the airline.”
• A roundtrip on two airlines: Expedia charges a booking fee for putting it on one itinerary, and the fee varies per ticket.
• A car rental: Expedia says rentals “have very specific additional charges” and to read the policies when picking up the car.
• A pending charge: Expedia says it means a booking was started but not completed, or was cancelled, and that it “disappears when the booking is finalized, or it expires within 5 days.”

How to find the booking

1. Write down the number on the line. If it is 14 digits and starts with 7, try it as the itinerary number. Expedia’s confirmation email also contains it, so search the inbox for “Expedia” and the amount before assuming the charge is not yours.⁵
2. Use Find your itinerary if you booked without signing in. Expedia has a page for that, and a separate “Forgot your itinerary number” page. A booking can take up to 24 hours to appear, and the confirmation can land in spam.⁵ If the booking is there, the itinerary page also has the receipt: choose Print receipt or Get receipt.⁶
3. Check who charged you before disputing. Expedia says refunds from third parties, such as airlines or property owners, come from that third party, and that the statement shows who charged you.² A deposit or hold taken by the property is the property’s charge, and Expedia says claims for it go to the property.⁹
4. If there is no booking, treat it as a card problem. One traveller wrote in May 2021 that a $333 charge from Expedia appeared after a booking failed, and that they could not get support because they had no itinerary number.⁸ That is their account, not something we have checked. Expedia’s own answer for a charge with no booking is that a pending line expires within 5 days; if it posts and you still cannot find a booking, ask your bank to dispute it and to check the card for other charges.¹

Cancel it, and what comes back

Flights. Cancel online under Trips, on the booking’s Manage booking page. Expedia says it will show the airline’s rules, restrictions and fees before the cancellation is final, and then a refund or credit summary. A booking made in the last 24 hours may be cancellable for a full refund, depending on the airline. A non-refundable fare gets no refund, but may get an airline credit. A roundtrip bought as separate tickets has to be cancelled flight by flight, sometimes with each airline directly. Travel insurance is not cancelled automatically: it has to be cancelled as well. Frontier, Ryanair and AirAsia handle their own cancellations, so those go to the airline.³

Hotels and vacation rentals. Cancel under Trips, then Change or cancel. If there is no cancel option, Expedia says the booking is either too close to check-in or non-refundable, and that the property may charge a fee; in that case it says to get in touch. A “Pay Later” booking is paid at the property, and a claim or refund for a hold or deposit the property took goes to the property, not to Expedia.⁴⁹

How long the money takes. Expedia says it may take up to 24 hours to process a refund; after that the bank or payment service takes over and “may take them 7 business days to send the credit to your account”; it may take longer to appear on a credit card statement. Refunds that come from a third party can take longer, and come from that third party.² In Delaware’s data, the 38 refunds that matched an earlier charge within a year had a median gap of 9 days.⁷

If the charge is still pending

A pending line is not a completed charge. Expedia says a pending charge from a booking that was not completed, or was cancelled, “expires within 5 days”, and that the bank can release the hold. In March 2026 a traveller wrote that a package booking failed, that a $370.40 airline charge appeared, that Expedia had no record of a booking, and that Expedia told them it should fall off in three days.¹⁰ That is their account. If the line is still there after five days and no booking exists, ask the bank to remove it rather than waiting longer.

Is this a scam?

Expedia is a real travel agency and a charge with a booking behind it is a real booking. The scam around this name is elsewhere: search results for “Expedia customer service” are full of pages that print a phone number and ask you to call it. Expedia’s own help pages send people to Trips, the Help Center and the contact page, not to a number in an advertisement. Use the site or the app you booked with, and do not give card details to a number you found in a search result.

Why this page is on a site about held money

This site records payment companies that hold back money that belongs to someone else. Expedia is not in the incident record; this page is here so that people searching for a name on a statement find the answer and the official time limits. A hotel booked through a third-party reseller is a different line: CCI*HOTEL RES. A flight is another: DELTA AIR and a number. A stay booked on Airbnb, as opposed to Expedia, is AIRBNB and a confirmation code. Other lines are in the table of statement names.

Sources

1. Expedia Help Center, “Unrecognized charges”: the list of cases that produce an unexpected charge, the two one-way fares paragraph, the “Reserve now, pay later” paragraph and the pending-charge paragraph (“expires within 5 days”). expedia.com/helpcenter. Read on 31 October 2026.
2. Expedia Help Center, “Refund timeline”: the 24-hour processing sentence, the 7 business days sentence, the credit-card statement sentence and the third-party refund paragraph. expedia.com/helpcenter. Read on 31 October 2026.
3. Expedia Help Center, “Cancel your flight”: cancelling under Trips, the 24-hour paragraph, non-refundable fares, separate tickets, the insurance sentence and the Frontier, Ryanair and AirAsia sentence. expedia.com/helpcenter. Read on 31 October 2026.
4. Expedia Help Center, “Cancel your stay”: cancelling under Trips, the “too close to check-in or non-refundable” paragraph and the property fee sentence. expedia.com/helpcenter. Read on 31 October 2026.
5. Expedia Help Center, “View your booking”: the confirmation email and itinerary number, the Find your itinerary page, the “Forgot your itinerary number” page and the 24-hour and spam paragraphs. expedia.com/helpcenter. Read on 31 October 2026.
6. Expedia Help Center, “Get a receipt for your booking”: Print receipt or Get receipt from the itinerary page, and the package sentence “your bank or credit card statement may show separate charges for each package item (flight, hotel, etc.)”. expedia.com/helpcenter. Read on 31 October 2026.
7. State of Delaware Open Data, State Employee Credit Card Transactions, fields “merchant”, “trans_dt”, “dept_name”, “div_name”, “cat_descr” and “merchandise_amt”. Lines whose merchant name begins EXPEDIA. Queried and counted on 31 October 2026: 1,371 lines from 28 June 2014 to 26 September 2026. “Same office” means the same department. A refund is a negative line matched to the latest earlier charge of the same amount in the same department, within one year. The lines in the table are copied as printed; the department names are left out.
8. Reddit, r/travel, post of 27 May 2021 by u/spylord5, “Expedia charged me money, no flight booked.”: the $333 charge and the sentence about having no itinerary number. reddit.com. Read in a browser on 31 October 2026; no archived copy is cited.
9. Expedia Help Center, “Payment options for your stay”: the property hold or early deposit paragraph, and the sentence that a claim or refund for those goes to the property. expedia.com/helpcenter. Read on 31 October 2026.
10. Reddit, r/travel, post of 25 March 2026 by u/ecmunoz, “Expedia charged my card no flight booked.”: the failed package booking, the $370.40 American Airlines charge, Expedia having no record of a booking, and the three-day answer. reddit.com. Read in a browser on 31 October 2026; no archived copy is cited.

The Expedia help pages build their article text with script. When we saved them on 31 October 2026 the Internet Archive stored only the page shell, without the article, so the links above are to the live pages as read that day and no archived copy is cited. The Delaware file is a public dataset and can be queried again from the link in source 7.