Travel companies are expert in setting up loyalty programs. Indeed, I don't know no airlines company that doesn't own its loyalty program, which provides free miles to its customer upon its consumption.
But Colloquy is pointing out a great information:
"Twenty percent of Americans polled in a survey commissioned by the Wyndham Rewards loyalty program said they would be unable to take their next vacation without cashing in rewards points".
"Knowing that travelers are still taking vacations, but watching their overall spend more carefully, we wanted to find out exactly how important rewards points are to Americans," says Jill Noblett, Wyndham Hotel Group Senior Vice President of Loyalty and Direct Marketing. "This survey tells us reward points are rather significant."
According to the survey, 64 percent of Americans say rewards points are either "very important" or "extremely important" given the state of the economy. Twenty-nine percent responded "very important" and 35 percent responded "extremely important."
"We’ve noticed a significant, upward trend in our members using Wyndham Rewards points for free nights across the Wyndham Hotel Group’s 11 brands," says Noblett. "The increase in redeeming Wyndham Rewards points for airline miles and tickets has also grown this year compared to last year."
In this specific field, loyalty programs have become so important people couldn't live with it. Actually, loyalty program management is one of the biggest issue of airlines companies. With people saving free miles, these companies would have hard time dealing with every customers taking all their miles at once (it will hurt the cash flow big time).
In some ways, these CRM programs are efficient as they are retaining the customers which is eager to use its milage it earned.
