AIRLINES & ALLIANCES

GLO Interview: Dr Nejib Ben-Khedher, Emirates Skywards on 35mn members, experiential loyalty, retail & awards (Full Interview)

00:00 On Reaching 35mn members and latest developments at Skywards • 02:18 On experiential loyalty and lifestyle loyalty • 06:23 On retail offering of Skywards and advice to US airlines’ attempts to grow retail offering • 10:25 On expanding Emirates’ partnerships network • 14:15 On leveraging loyalty program to mitigate negative effects on customers' delays or natural disasters • 16:30 on gamification and one prediction for the loyalty industry for the coming 12 months

GLO

00:00 On reaching 35mn members and latest developments at Skywards.

02:18 On experiential loyalty and lifestyle loyalty

06:23 On retail offering of Skywards and advice to US airlines’ attempts to grow retail offering

10:25 On expanding Emirates’ partnerships network

14:15 On leveraging loyalty program to mitigate negative effects on customers’ delays or natural disasters

16:30 On gamification and one prediction for the loyalty industry for the coming 12 months

Full transcript: 

00:00

GLO: Dr Najib, thank you so much for welcoming us, Global Loyalty Organization, at this majestic stand of Emirates at Arabian Travel Market 2024.

Nejib Ben-Khedher Divisional SVP, Skywards, Emirates: Thank you, Anastasia, for coming to visit us here at the stand, and looking forward to our discussion this morning.

00:43

GLO: Emirates is an official airline of Arabian Travel Market 2024 – congratulations on that. We saw Dubai becoming one of the leading hubs of travel. Despite geopolitical turmoil, despite natural disasters leisure travel and business travel in Dubai has increased dramatically. How is Emirates growing? How is your Skywards membership growing? What are the latest developments?

Nejib Ben-Khedher Divisional Snr.VP, Skywards, Emirates: Well, despite the turmoil, as you said, around us, Dubai continues to consistently deliver premium service to the visitors and the residents. And therefore, it’s attracting more people to Dubai, it makes our job a bit easier as a loyalty program, operating out of Dubai and supporting one of the best airlines in the world. So we continue to grow, as you mentioned, Anastasia. I think last time we talked, we were talking about 30 million members. Now we’re hovering around 34, 35 million members. The most important thing is not truly to continue to drive the top line, because our focus has shifted somewhat toward ensuring that we have active and engaged members. Everything we do from a program perspective in terms of expanding our ecosystem, working with partners, and providing the right products to our members is to activate them and keep them interacting with the airline and visiting Dubai.

02:18

GLO: This year at ATM 2024, the key topics for loyalty are experiential loyalty and lifestyle loyalty. And we look forward to Emirates’ insights on the panel in one hour, hosted by Global Loyalty Organization. We’re seeing a trend of moving from traditional pure miles, frequent flyer programs, earn and burn, to a wider range of benefits offered to customers – experiences, entertainment features and benefits. What is your view as a head of loyalty of one of the leading global airlines? Is this a consistent trend? Are we going to see it for a long time?

Nejib Ben-Khedher: Loyalty has always been about driving that emotional connection that you have with your brand. Experiences, and I would say “money can’t buy” experiences that you can curate, are actually part of that drive from a loyalty business perspective. But I joke and say Emirates is about “Fly better”, we try to amplify that message “Travel better and live better”, as a loyalty program with the help, of course, of our partners, not just simply us as a lifestyle airline, but also expanding and working with our hotel, car rental partners, and also our everyday partners as well.

On experiential part specifically we’re putting a lot of focus into that. We have a platform called Skywards Exclusives, where we provide our members the ability to redeem their miles, and sometimes bid their miles for certain events, against events or money cant buy experiences. Just a couple that have happened in the last 12 months were a retreat working with Dilma Tea. Dilma Tea is one of the premium tea brands that’s served on our flights. We worked with them on couples retreats in Sri Lanka for people to do tea tasting for a few days, working again with Dilma. We had members bid up to 350,000 miles to be able to get to an experience like this.

Just a few weeks back, we worked with Moet Chandon, which is also served on our flights to curate experience in France as well for our members. These are some of the things that only a handful of members have, but it amplifies our stand around providing experiences for our members. Of course, we have things around football, rugby, cricket, and all the sports we sponsor as well – we provide members with access to these events or experiences. That’s really to answer your question on the experiential part of it.

If I look just at the airline itself, upgrades continue to be the reward that’s most sought after by our members, especially our elite members as well. For me, that experience of providing or delighting somebody to get an upgrade up to the time of departure, you could seek an upgrade if you have the miles that can support that, is in itself a delighting experience, etc. That’s part of the emotional connection. That’s part of the attractiveness of the program as well.

Emotional loyalty is going to continue to be a trend. I think what we’ve seen with the rebound of travel, is that travel has continued to consistently perform extremely well post-COVID. I think it’s a yo-yo effect in some way, people wanting really to experience things. The services that we’re providing on board, at the airport for our elite members, create that emotional connection and make us an award-winning program.

06:23

GLO: Dr. Najib, one of the most prominent parts of the Emirates newsstand here at the Arabian Travel Market is the Emirates’ official e-store. Emirates and Skywards, the pioneers of implementing retail offerings to their customers. You have Skywards Everyday, which is introducing retail opportunities, and earn and burn opportunities to customers. Now we’re seeing in the U.S. a lot of the airlines following this suit and trying to combine and make a synergetic effect between travel, airlines, and retail. What advice can you give to the new entrants to the market?

Nejib Ben-Khedher:  Anastasia, let me go back to these emotional connections because people also connect through our branded items that are sold in the Emirates’ official store as well. So they keep a piece of the airline with them in their daily life, if you will. Now you’re right, you can use Skywards Miles to buy some of these gifts from the Emirates official store. But when we talk about retail and lifestyle, we have expanded our offering. Skywards Miles Mall provides access to hundreds of retailers in five geographies. We’re present in India, UAE, Australia, U.S. and U.K. And one of the biggest engagements we have from our U.K. member base, which is our largest member base, is through the Skywards Miles Mall.

We also, as you mentioned, launched a few years back Skywards Everyday, enhancing the experience on Skywards Everyday as an app where people can seamlessly link their credit cards and they can just seamlessly walk into any store, including Costa. It’s micro-earning, if you will because on a coffee like this, you would earn five, six miles and it would earn more if you get a sandwich with it or a pastry. But it just allows you daily a frictionless experience because your card is linked to be able to just walk into a Costa coffee, for example, or any of the 200+ retailers that we have on Skywards Everyday and earn these miles, etc.

So you’re right, we’re expanding both here in Dubai, where our currency is becoming more and more a prominent loyalty currency beyond the airline itself, but also into our member bases, into our major member bases as well, through Skywards Miles Mall and other partners in the lifestyle category.

I believe a lot of airlines, whether in the U.S. but also in Asia as well, have looked into this whole everyday connection with the airline through everyday partners. And I believe it is a trend to stay. It allows members to connect with the airline and its loyalty program in this case, but also gives them more opportunity to earn miles. In the case of Skywards Everyday and talking about retail, if you go to a Dubai mall, interact with a Skywards Everyday partner, and use your co-brand credit card, you’re triple dipping in terms of the miles that you’re earning. It provides our members an opportunity to earn more as good travel better and live better, as I mentioned earlier.

10:10

GLO: Your efforts yielded very, very good results because you were awarded several awards in the last 12 months, including yesterday’s Business Travel in the Middle East Award. Congratulations on that.

Nejib Ben-Khedher: Thank you.

10:25

GLO: I wanted to ask you the following, within the GLO, we produced a Predictions 2024 trend report on loyalty. One of the key trends we saw is that customers would like to have the flexibility to earn and burn their points and the partnership network to be expanded. You already are connected to mobility. You’re connected to some of the airline partners. Where next for the Emirates?

Nejib Ben-Khedher: Anastasia, you just mentioned the award. So let me savor that for 30 seconds. We were very proud to have received the Business Travel Award for Best Airline Loyalty Program. We also received the World Travel Award for Best FFP as well. And then just a few days back, we received the Best Loyalty Program from International Loyalty Awards as well. That one is very interesting for us. And we, again, savor it maybe more than the others, if I have to compare, simply because it was competing with other indices, not just other airlines and we were the only airline that received the award last week at the ceremony. So, again, all these awards, of course, recognize all the hard work from my team, my leadership team, and also the broader Skyworks team, and also recognition of the airline itself. We’re blessed to work again for an airline like Emirates. And that makes, again, our life easier and gives us the exposure that we need for us to win these awards. But, again, I don’t want to minimize it as well. We’ve worked very hard.

We’ve introduced new products like the subscription products with Skywards+. We introduced new platforms like Skywards Everyday. We continue to expand our partner system as well. So you’re right. The partners play a big role for us. And we have partners across several categories, whether it’s hotel partners, with the work we’re doing with Marriott Bonvoy, which was also primed as the best hotel loyalty program at the Business Travel Award as well yesterday. So we felt very good that the two partners received these awards at the same time. So whether it’s hotels, rental cars, or financial partners, we work through Ascenda and through Points.com as well to expand our reach across the world. We’re a global loyalty program by definition, and those partners allow us to have relevance as well across the world. And, you know, we couldn’t do it on our own. We have to use platforms that help us scale as well very quickly into several geographies around the world.

We’re looking at other forms of transportation. Rail is big in Europe. We’re contemplating some of that as well to see how we can work with rail operators as well. Today we have an excellent partner in Easyjet and Condor as well in Europe. But we need to expand further as rail becomes much more prominent in Europe as well. So that’s one of the things we’re looking at as well. So we will continue to look at partners where it is relevant for us, not just for the sake of, you know, creating earn and burn opportunities for members, but doing it in a relevant way as well, not just trying to multiply these partners. It becomes very difficult to manage if you do so. We want to make it very, very relevant.

14:15

GLO: April 2024 saw unprecedented floods in Dubai. Obviously not everything that the Emirates loyalty team and Emirates management team can control. How do you think a loyalty program can play a role in mitigating the effect that the customers had as a result of these unprecedented natural disasters?

Nejib Ben-Khedher: First of all, Anastasia, kudos to our operations team for all the heroism sometimes in addressing a situation like this unprecedented for the airline, unprecedented for Dubai as well. again, kudos for them, the frontline teams, our heroes who have managed the situation, despite extreme challenges, I would say even, including getting to the airport to be able to operate.

From a loyalty perspective, I always say that a moment of truth is really when you get disruptions like this and the recovery that you do and how do you take care of your premium members as well as your members in general? And I think we have a role to play in terms of helping out with that recovery, whether it’s expediting baggage retrieval for some members or ensuring that they’re well taken care of end to end as well. The lounges played a big role in terms of allowing people to rest between flights where there’s disruption was going on as well. So I think you win the hearts of your members. But, you know, we always talk about experiences as a delight. But this is this is much more about recovery. And this is a moment of truth from a loyalty perspective as well. And, you know, we learn from situations like this. Unfortunately, it’s becoming more recurrent, at least the climate-related ones. We need to learn from it and continue to fine-tune as well. I mean, it was a very humbling situation. Again, we learned from it and hopefully, we’ll get better at it as we go.

16:30

GLO: And finishing on the positive and future outlook, if you permit. Some of the GLO research pinpointed 5-6 key trends that are shaping the industry now. You mentioned in your previous answers, the rise of partnership and expanding ecosystems. Very big focus on personalization and the use of possibly big data analysis, AI to tailor personal experience, the customers’ zeal for gamification. You know, Gen Z and Gen Alpha, they are very much interested in gamified approach. What do you expect for the coming 12 months? Is there one prediction you can make for the loyalty industry?

Nejib Ben-Khedher: I mean, you gave the trends and these are the trends we’re seeing as well. And we’re trying to see how we can, for example, harness data for us to be much more relevant when we’re putting offers to our members. Whether it is our Miles Retailing Platform through Points, where we’re now leveraging AI in terms of these offers, or when people are doing in-path shopping at our website how do we position the offers to members to get them to convert through a session. That’s about the use of data to make things relevant to our members or to cater in a relevant to our members.

Gamification is very big. Something we’re looking at Skywards every day. That’s more, again, about working with retailers, etc. But how do we gamify things, etc.? So all these are trends that we’re looking at and we’re trying to be at the forefront in terms of how do we leverage technology to make these things happen.

Making predictions is extremely difficult. We just talked about the weather and how difficult it is to predict some of these trends. So we will continue to be vigilant and look at what’s happening. We will continue to learn from other industries as well. I think the airlines have started with FFPs in the early 80s. I mean, FFPs are for airlines, but loyalty programs in general, I think the airlines have mastered the art of it. Now, when I look at what telecom does with the use of data, in particular, what retail does, etc., there’s a lot for us to learn from. And I guess it’s very humbling for me to just sit and listen to my peers from other industries talk about what they’re doing. And we’ll learn from what they’re doing and we’ll just take things forward.

18:55

GLO: Thank you so much. And we’re delighted, you know, that loyalty started to open up. At Global Loyalty Organisation, one of the goals is to increase partnerships and share the knowledge and share insights between the top loyalty experts. And we hope to see you again next year.

Nejib Ben-Khedher: Always a pleasure. And we look forward to the interactions with all our partners through the Global Loyalty Organization. Thank you so much.

Source: GLO