In this work, we provide an alternate approach to obtaining expansion formulas on the lines of the well-poised Bailey lemma. We recover results due to Spiridonov and Warnaar and one new formula of this type. These formulas contain an arbitrary sequence as an argument and are thus flexible in the number of parameters they contain. As a result, we can derive 8 new transformation formulas for elliptic hypergeometric series. These transformation formulas appear to be new even in the basic hypergeometric case, when $p=0$. (Joint work with Gaurav Bhatnagar.)