Create a seamless loyalty program experience with consistency—consistency in the way you recognize members and meet their needs along the customer journey, and across digital and in-person touchpoints. Alleviate pain points during the redemption experience by creating transparency around eligible rewards, ensuring your technology facilitates easy redemption, and offering members flexibility and a choice in reward options. Lastly, ensure your program and mobile app include time-saving benefits and features that make it easy to check-in/out, manage rewards, access amenities, and contact guest services.
2. Get Personal
Consumer expectations around personalization have grown significantly as digital journeys deliver better experiences. But personalization hasn’t fully fulfilled its promise. A birthday email just doesn’t cut it anymore—in fact, it’s the bare minimum. Members want brands to leverage the wealth of data that they already have to tailor their journey touchpoints, including communications.
There is large payoff for brands with an effective and engaging communications strategy, yet only 28% of Americans strongly agree that they are getting relevant communications from hotel loyalty programs. It is increasingly important to hotel loyalty members that they be ‘kept informed of how to maximize their experience’. Sending communications that facilitate understanding and usage of the program (e.g. available benefits, education, special offers, etc.) has become table stakes. Leading programs will also add a layer of lifecycle communications that focus on some of the most important communications to members—from welcome messages to acknowledging activity. The the best-in-class brands focus on the simple, yet powerful, communications that ensure its members get the most out of the program. These include acknowledging membership anniversaries, following-up about their experience with benefits, recommending purchases to help them achieve tier status, and sharing how the brand supports their community.
3. Keep Humans at the Center
In an increasingly digitized and AI-driven world, we’ve seen the role of human connection become especially important. For the fourth year in a row, ‘program representatives make me feel special/recognized’ continues to be a top driver of loyalty. Yet, only 22% of hotel program members strongly agree that program representatives deliver on this promise. While that is a slight improvement over the 21% of American loyalty members who agreed on this point in 2023, there is still plenty of room for improvement.
This year’s data set reveals that loyalty members (especially high-value members) increasingly expect an elevated experience. We see this delivery of elevated experiences show up in different ways—whether by providing guests special recognition for their tier status, to going above and beyond to make them feel valued, to even making them feel like they are part of the brand family. Regardless of how, the commonality across these examples is the existence of a real, human connection. While AI may help operationally, customers still desire a human at the center of their experiences to connect and forge lasting bonds.
For example, 46% of guests of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts strongly agree that brand representatives make them feel special and recognized. In contrast, just 21% of Americans strongly agree brands overall do the same. What makes this notable is that Four Seasons, a luxury hospitality brand, doesn’t have a formal loyalty program. Instead, through the effective use of data, they deliver exceptional, personalized experiences. The brand is known for getting to know its guests: upon learning a guest’s name at the valet, they then message the front desk to acknowledge the guest by name, one of many small gestures to make them feel welcomed.
Hotels should harness consumer insights and data to optimize their loyalty program and retain guests, in turn, unlocking its share of customers’ hearts and wallets. With the right approach, the hotel sector can look forward to a future of sustained growth and lasting bonds.
