I have thirty-nine thousand points with a hotel chain I do not particularly like. I know this because they emailed me last week to tell me my status is safe through 2021, which was kind, and slightly absurd, given that I have cancelled every trip on my calendar and so has everyone I know.
That email is the clearest picture of what these programs became. In the middle of the worst month the travel industry has ever had, the thing the brand chose to say to me was a number.
Which is what happens when you spend two decades turning a relationship into arithmetic.
Loyalty programs started as a thank you and hardened into a currency. Currencies get devalued. Every chain has quietly raised award rates, added blackout dates, split tiers into more tiers, and introduced a second points system to reward the first one. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, where the loyalty deck and the brand deck get built by different teams who do not read each other's work.
The moment your customer can calculate the exact value of caring about you, they will, and the answer will not flatter you.
Points are a switching cost, not an affection. They hold people who would otherwise leave, which looks like loyalty right up until a competitor offers a status match and the whole balance walks across the street in an afternoon. Marriott and Hilton have been trading the same travelers back and forth for years and calling it retention.
What actually holds people is much less measurable. The front desk that remembers you. The room that is the same room in Denver and in Lisbon, so you know what you are getting at eleven at night. Ace built an entire brand on a lobby people wanted to sit in, and nobody in that lobby is thinking about points.
This month is an unusually honest test. Nobody is earning anything. Strip the arithmetic away and what is left is whether people have any feeling about your brand at all. Some chains are finding out that they have been renting attention for twenty years and never once bought any.
Points are a switching cost, not an affection.
My karaoke bar in Southeast Portland is closed, and I have no idea when it reopens. I have no points there. I have never been offered a tier. The host calls everyone baby and remembers that I do Bonnie Tyler badly, and I will be back the first night the doors open, which is more than any hotel can currently say about me.