Hotel Loyalty Programme Essentials

Are hotel loyalty programmes overly complicated?

Welcome back! Another Monday, another edition of The Hotel Hype.

Last week I was lucky enough to be asked to do a Q&A segment at the Digital Travel Summit conference in London.

This is a great event that I have previously attended. It features a mix of travel companies talking about various tech and marketing challenges, from AI to personalisation, social media to influencers, and everything else in between.

My Q&A session was on hotel loyalty programmes. Loyalty programmes are a key tool for brands to help encourage guests to become frequent stayers. In exchange for stays, guests can earn points that can spent on future stays or with select partners.

At BWH Hotels, we have our Best Western Rewards loyalty programme which has over 60 million members globally. This programme is just as important to us as a brand now as when it launched over 30 years ago.

A lot of interesting questions about loyalty schemes were raised at the conference, and I thought it would be worth highlighting some of the main principles I would expect a successful loyalty programme to have in order to be successful, so let’s get into it…

Instant benefits

Loyalty programmes are now more competitive than ever. Almost every hotel brand has one, and so do most OTAs.