Jeffrey Goh, Chair Gulf Air Group // Benjamin Lipsey, Head of Flying Blue Air France - KLM // Kristi Gole, Head of Strategy, Global Hotel Alliance // Andrea Pinna, Global SVP Loyalty Strategy, Radisson Hotel Group.
GLOWhat where the key milestones and most significant developments in loyalty as well as loyalty technologies for the industry and for your company in 2022?
Jeffrey Goh, CEO Gulf Air Group: Let me reflect on what has been key the past three years or just a little under three years, not just for the loyalty industry, but also for the airline and air travel industry. We have been through a Wild Wild West, but it is this Wild Wild West from which we have drawn many good lessons, amongst which the acceleration of digitalization is one of the main ones. The opportunity to digitalize more has allowed better engagement with customers all around the world in whatever industry we might be talking about – food delivery is a very clear one – but of cause, also in the airline industry. And I think, we achieved a lot in digitalisation in a broader way not only in 2022, but as we come out from the three years of very deep and dark crises that we’ve had to deal with, both in the airline industry and elsewhere.
At Star Alliance, we are very excited with new launch of Star Alliance HSBC credit card, that we did a few weeks ago and which is an industry-first alliance co-branded credit card. This is indeed a significant milestone for Star Alliance to have a loyalty proposition that others only talk about. Of course, over the years we have built various loyalty products and strengthened our loyalty proposition, but this is the one that we hope will be game-changing for air travel of the future.
Ben Lipsey, SVP Customer Loyalty, Air France – KLM: From an industry perspective, I think the COVID-triggered program extension measures were probably a big development. We saw, starting in 2020, a lot of local programmes across different industries put into place measures that extended members’ tier status. I think we saw 90% of them extended end as of December 31, our program included.
So, I think you have a lot of members who maintained loyalty status with hotels or airlines for longer than they would have normally. Hence, I think we see a lot of people who have changed their travel behaviour over the last couple of years and I’m interested to see where that goes and changes now.
At Air France – KLM we launched a number of interesting partners and features to our programme. And there’s more that’s coming as well.
Kristi Gole, Head of Product, Global Hotel Alliance: I think the biggest thing wasn’t specific just this past year, but something that continued to grow and culminate, is that loyalty programmes are more and more moving to the forefront, at least in hospitality, whereas it used to be just a piece of the marketing puzzle or a subset of a customer strategy. And now and then you can look at the big programmes, it started in 2018/2019 and it was getting much more visible like Marriott Bonvoy and Accor All and you’re seeing that it is no longer about the hotel brands. If anything, those were secondary to the loyalty programme that connected them all. And so that became the key message and then customers were being trained by them that this is how it works.
You have all these disparate programmes or disparate hotels and brands coming together. That’s exactly what GHA is. We bring together independent hotel brands. It was really good to see that customers were connecting to what they wanted – all of these separate items to be pulled together in one programme. They have to remember only one website, one app. A loyalty programme that rewards you.
So in addition to the value proposition of the hotel, which could be based on location or the price or the brand, in addition, they’ve got this extra component of a loyalty programme. I think it’s become more and more prevalent. And particularly in 2022, you saw a lot of decisions being made because travellers are starting to travel again. And they’re not as loyal to brands are not as loyal to specific hotels or destinations. And so, if anything, they were looking more to the programme, a loyalty programme to say, where else should I try because I’m connected to this network? For us, that was really advantageous, and I feel like that’s continuing to grow and I’m not seeing that stopping or stalling in the near future.
Andrea Pinna, Global Vice President Loyalty Strategy & Customer Care, Radisson Hotel Group: The industry has been very active in 2022 to reshape the programmes and adapt them to post-pandemic trends, making them more flexible and personalised. Both hotel and airline industries focus on the changes, on expanding the flexibility of earning and redeeming points, particularly the awarding policy. Now many more programmes are based on a fair approach taking into consideration how much the client is spending, like in a fully dynamic model the airlines introduced many years ago based on the value of the ticket and not just only on the distance. Therefore, with the Radisson Rewards campaign “So easy, so much more” it has been our main strategy to focus on exclusive benefits, which allows VIP members to advance to the highest tier twice as fast as before. These benefits can be accessed from day one and are available across the entire member journey from travel inspiration to actual booking.
