The Travolution Blog has an outstanding quote from Bill Walshe, chief executive of Jurys Doyle Hotel Group, on loyalty programs:
Given the opportunity he would go back to five minutes before the person who dreamt up the idea of loyalty programmes, and then beat him around the head with a spade.
That’s good, and it’s true.
According to Forrester Research, 70% of online travel bookers in the US have no particular loyalty. If 70% of the people booking travel are disloyal, the industry’s loyalty programs are obviously a massive failure.
We think most loyalty programs in the travel industry suck–they’re complicated, restrictive and never achieve the “loyalty” they’re trying to create. We made a list of the three things that suck the most about loyalty programs in the travel industry:
- You need a PhD to figure out what you can get for your points
- You don’t necessarily get points every time you book
- Redeeming your points is more complicated than building a teleportation machine
All well and true but it really shouldn’t be a reason not to offer a *simple* program. I, for one, have spent many lakhs of rupees on Cleartrip and while I’m happy to continue to do so in the absence of a loyalty program, throw a dog a bone will ya?
Its not rocket science to realise that consumers have money & options, and are using both where they get satisfaction.
Offers will not buy loyalty, but service would. If the service & product offering is strong, repeat business is bound to happen, even in the face of competitive prices of others.
Offers will just add the feel-good factor.
Nice Post !
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Agree with Gautam completely…..
Very true. The same happened with me when I used Travelguru. I got 2000 points, and the conditions to use those points are:
1. I need to use them in one single transaction
2. It shouldn’t be more than 25% of the transaction amount
3. It has to be a hotel booking
They should have better not given me the points which I cant use anytime because of their flexible terms and conditions.
Loyalty programme work and it work every where provided it is kept as simple as Rs 100 will get you 10 reward points and 10 reward points will get you item X on redeeming those 10 points at your convinience.
If programme is full of conditionms like that of travel guru, customer will say do hell with your loyalty programme.