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Airline loyalty value depends heavily on how frequently you can travel on one carrier and how much you value things like upgrades. Hotel loyalty is a whole dif
by splonk 5y ago
Airline loyalty value depends heavily on how frequently you can travel on one carrier and how much you value things like upgrades.
Hotel loyalty is a whole different ballgame because the margins that hotels pay to the booking sites are much higher (20-30%). For a long time hotels were contractually obligated to give the aggregators their lowest publicly available price ("most favored nation" - some recent EU regulation may have cut down on this, not sure what the current status is). One way of getting around that is direct marketing, so hotels are highly incented to get you to sign up for a loyalty program, give you 10% off, and keep the other 10% that would otherwise go to Booking/Expedia.
- ghaff 5y agoYeah, airline loyalty is (was?) pretty much about focusing on one carrier (and its partners) wherever possible even if it's not always ideal. And flying a lot. I'd hit 60-75K miles a year on one carrier. Who knows if I'll ever do that again. Hotels were always something I signed up for and used when I could but I never did unnatural acts to do so. May be different especially if traveling domestically primarily to $BIGCHAIN which almost always has an option.
- JackFr 5y agoThe key to extracting value from airline loyalty programs is not being the one paying for the flights. Many programs now don’t care as much for the number of flight miles as the dollars spent. Business travelers are much less price discriminatory and so airlines get fatter margins. They loyalty programs end up transferring value from your firm to you.