00:00 Air Caraibes 4 loyalty programs • 02:00 Plans to restructure the loyalty program • 02:47 Details on the types of customers of Air Caraibes • 04:45 On code hare partners, Groupe Debreuil and loyalty partnerships • 07:12 on Preference loyalty program differentiating features • 08:17 On cash&miles • 08:45 On key priorities for loyalty program innovation • 09:45 On the potential of co-branded cards • 10:15 1’000’000 miles question • 10:54 One advice
GLO
00:00 Air Caraibes 4 loyalty programs
02:00 Plans to restructure the loyalty program
02:47 Details on the types of customers of Air Caraibes
04:45 On code hare partners, Groupe Debreuil and loyalty partnerships
07:12 on Preference loyalty program differentiating features
08:17 On cash&miles
08:45 On key priorities for loyalty program innovation
09:45 On the potential of co-branded cards
10:15 1’000’000 miles question
10:54 One advice
Interview Transcript:
0000
GLO: Eddie, it’s a pleasure to welcome you at Amadeus’s headquarters in the south of France and thank you for two days of exciting discussions about loyalty and custom experience.
Eddy Jean-Elie: That was a great moment and a great event, thanks for inviting me to this event and I am very pleased to answer your questions.
GLO: You are the Head of the Loyalty program for Air Caraibes, one of the leading Caribbean Airlines based out of Guadalupe.
Eddy Jean-Elie: Yes that’s correct. I joined the company just one year ago, a bit more than one year ago to be the Head of loyalty programs. I used to work already in the airline industry in another airline and now I am in charge of four loyalty programs.
GLO: Can you guide us a little bit more on how the loyalty programs are structured at Air Caraibes? How are they interacting with each other? What are the key benefits and features you are offering?
Eddy Jean-Elie: We target four different categories of customers. Of course, we have the normal loyalty program which is named Preference, dedicated to all our passengers, as of two years old. Then we also want to address a dedicated offer to students traveling on our airline and we also a to have something dedicated to business customers – we have a specific loyalty program named “Flexilpro” for individual business passengers. We have another solution which is what we call “Abonne”. It’s a subscription card and with this solution the customer benefits from discounted fares on tickets.
02:00
GLO: That’s quite interesting. What’s your vision for these programs? Are you planning to keep them as four separate programs or do you plan to restructure them? Where do you want to go from here?
Eddy Jean-Elie: Since last year we have had a complete change of our top management so now we are in a specific phase when we are analyzing the situation to try to better recognize our customers and see what would be the best offer for each category of customers. So it’s a bit early now to say what we are going to do, but we think that it was a good opportunity to meet other companies and to meet Amadeus to see what could be possible for us.
02:27
GLO: Your customer base and your loyalty membership base is it predominantly domestic, the home base, eg Guadaloop citizens or it’s one of the tourists that are coming to the country?
Eddy Jean-Elie: So we have two categories of customers let’s say. If we are talking about the scope of our network we have a transatlantic long-haul network and we also have what we call a regional network meaning that we fly from Paris airport to the West Indies island of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and St. Martin. In the coming months Punta Cana, French Gayana and also we we fly to Mexico and Cancun.
In addition to this network, we have a regional network that allows our customers to fly from one island to the other one, meaning from Pointe-à-Pitre to St. Martin or from Pointe-à-Pitre to France and back.
GLO: So it’s servicing all of the citizens who are living in the islands in the West Indies and connections to Paris as well as the irregular or infrequent flyers who are coming up as a tourist?
Eddy Jean-Elie: We have tourists coming from Europe, from Paris (mostly from France) to our islands and we also have local customers who need to travel to France or who are living in France and want to come back to to visit their families. So we try to offer a different kind of services to all those customers, tourists and community customers belonging to those islands.
04:45
GLO: How does your loyalty program structure for the partnerships? Who are your code share partners? How does your loyalty program integrate with Air France and of few other partners that you have?
Eddy Jean-Elie: We do not have at this stage partners. We form part of a group, which is a Groupe Dubreuil, which owns two companies Air Caraibes and French Bee. So we allow our loyalty members to accreu miles on our flights. Also on our code share flights with our other company which is French Bee and then they can also burn miles on both airlines. But there is no at this step other possibilities for our customer to accrue or to burn miles with partners.
GLO: What about non-airline partners? Do you have the local network of non-airline partnerships, where your customers can burn miles or this is something you are planning for the future?
Eddy Jean-Elie: We plan that. We only have one partner, which is the Sixt. At this step we started to allow accrual of miles with Sixt and then our customer can benefit from discounted fares.
06:10
GLO: You are quite a unique airline because you are quite lean. So probably any change or any innovation can happen much faster than at the bigger airlines. What is your vision where do you want to see the program maybe in 2 years or 12 months? Maybe you heard of some of the features at this Amadeus day that potentially excited you?
Eddy Jean-Elie: We are trying to build a new strategy within our global airline strategy to know exactly what we’re going to do with our loyalty programs. The idea is to ofcourse make sure that we adapt our rules for our loyalty programs and that we choose the right tools with Amadeus to make sure that the offer is um correct for our customers.
07:12
GLO: In your region how do you compete with other airlines and other loyalty programs in the offering to the customers? How do you differentiate?
Eddy Jean-Elie: We have a specific loyalty program, the most important one I’m talking about is “Preference”, which is a bit different from the other ones. And that’s to be honest this is very difficult for all customers to make a comparison among all those different loyalty programs. We have decided now to have a fixed grid for accrual and redemption of miles – meaning that all our customers know in advance how many miles they will accrue for a flight and how minimum miles they will need for a reward ticket, which is not the case exactly for our competitors because they have a dynamic program. That allows a different amount of acral or redemption.
08:12
GLO: Do you allow cash and miles payments? What’s your approach to that? How do you deal with partnerships?
Eddy Jean-Elie: We started to implement cash and miles for ancillary sales and the goal is of course to extend this this capability to revenue tickets so our customers will be allowed to redeem miles on revenue tickets in the future.
08:45
GLO: Among the latest technologies that we discussed here at Amadeus’s conferences and listening to the other airlines is there any technology that you can see transforming the loyalty program and the loyalty industry in the coming 12 -18 months and which makes you excited about?
Eddy Jean-Elie: Of course, there are a lot of options that could be implemented to make sure that we will retain, we will keep our customers in our company. Of course, the cash and miles as we said is the first one. Then we want to make sure that we will recognize better our customers along the journey and during any event during their lives meaning that they will not be in touch with us only when they travel with us but for any event that could happen during their normal life.
09:45
GLO: Do you have any co-brand cards?
Eddy Jean-Elie: Potentially, in the future, but not yet. Of course, this is a goal that we want to achieve in the future. But we need to be mature, to have this kind of partnership because there is a lot of financial impact. It could be very interesting in terms of revenue but we have to fix all the basics in our program before such an implementation.
10:15
GLO: We usually ask personal questions to our interviewers. Allow me please to ask two questions to you. First and foremost if you had 1 million miles of points whatever you call it how would you spend them?
Eddy Jean-Elie: Of course, I would travel. I would travel using Air Caraib or French Bee because we have a lot of destinations. I said we fly from West Indies but with French Bee we also fly to the States. There are a lot of destinations in the USA. We also fly to Tahiti so that would be great for me to spend to to redeem miles to fly to Polynesia.
10:54
GLO: You have over 30 years of experience in the airline and loyalty industry. If you had a chance to look back and give one piece of advice to a young person or young Eddy, who just starting in the industry what would be your advice?
Eddy Jean-Elie: It’s a very interesting question, because of course I was working in different places around the world. I had different positions not only in the loyalty environment. I think the first thing I would say is “Do what you want to do. Follow your instinct and enjoy what you are doing”, because you spend a lot of time at work. If you are fully involved in what you are doing, if you believe in what you are doing, you will have a nice moment with all your colleagues and you will feel that you are doing something for someone and this is very important.
GLO: Thank you so much we look forward you to developing to innovate and would be happy to hear when your strategy is ready.
Eddy Jean-Elie: Thanks for this interview and I will keep in touch.
Source: GLO
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