Customer loyalty can be one of the biggest challenges for airlines these days. The industry is highly competitive, travelers have higher expectations for rewards and benefits, and coordinating rewards and benefits within loyalty programs can be complex.
So how did a low-cost carrier based in Mexico attract millions of new members to its loyalty program in a little over year? We spoke with Eloisa Garcia Lobato, head of Loyalty Partnerships for Doters Points loyalty program, on her approach to bringing in the right loyalty ecosystem partners and what’s next for the airlines’ loyalty offering.
You launched your loyalty program a little over a year ago. How’s it going?
We recently hit 4 million members subscribing to our program and 33% of them are active members in the program. In a short amount to of time, our loyalty members are starting to use their points to take advantage of the program’s benefits.
One piece of feedback we’ve received is how quickly members can accrue points in our ecosystem. We wanted a program that really makes the customer feel that the points they’re accumulating are really rewarding them in aspirational ways. We’re able to create not just a transactional experience but a real emotional connection with our customers.
There’s a lot of focus these days on customer experience. How do you marry your loyalty strategies with experience?
We cannot speak about loyalty without providing a good customer experience. The simplicity and ease of booking a flight needs to match the ease of our loyalty program. We want to have everything available with a click and in your pocket - that's how we want to reward their loyalty.
You also have a new card with HSBC that you launched around the same time. How is that going?
So far, we have exceeded our goal by almost 100%. We spent a lot of time analyzing other cards in the market and making sure we had unique features for our card.
We had many doubts in the beginning, but we were able to work with Mastercard Advisors to classify the attributes we were more interested in versus the propositions we were getting from different banks. We also received guidance on what we needed to handle the lifecycle of the card and the activities and team we needed to consider going forward.
You spoke about your loyalty program’s ecosystem. How do you evaluate partners in that ecosystem?
This a big challenge because we have many companies that have contacted us. But we also have certain companies that we know we want to bring into the ecosystem. So we struggled with prioritizing the companies that could bring us more members or the ones with higher value propositions.
Again, we tapped into Mastercard Advisors to analyze the market opportunities and good matches for our program and the value proposition we wanted to build. We prioritized different partners according to the impact and ease of integration. We had three categories of partners – quick wins, core partners and strategic partners. That helped us to have more clarity in which companies we could focus our efforts on. We’re a small team so we wanted to make the most of our time.
What are your plans to add more partners in the long term?
We’re talking to different partners, including companies in retail, health insurance, telcos, and more. We already identified the companies we want to work with and we’re talking to them. So it’s just a matter of time to start closing those negotiations.
What were the biggest lessons learned in launching and growing Viva Aerobus’ loyalty program?
In some ways it felt like we were building a small company. There were times that as we were getting close to launching, we had to regroup because we just weren’t ready yet. We had to think about the experience for the customer and evaluate some benefits over other benefits. We were pushing our launch because we wanted to have the best program for our customers. So the lesson learned is that it’s a world that is constantly evolving. So you have to make the decision to launch and in that process, you have to take into consideration that probably for the first 2-3 months, you need to monitor really closely the different benefits. You also need to look at the customer experience and evaluate whether it’s as simple and easy as you wanted it to be and if it meets all of the promises you communicated to your customers. You will always find opportunities to enhance.
What advice do you have for finding the right partners?
It depends on the objectives that you want to pursue with partners – there are partnerships that can help you grow your value proposition or to grow your customer base. In our case, we wanted partners that could help us reward our customers in their day-to-day transactions. For example, we have partners who help our customers once they’ve completed their flight and need ground transportation.
What is the future of the loyalty program and future innovation?
We’re considering a customer data platform to have access to all of our customer information in just one profile to allow us to make more targeted offers based on more insights. For example, if they prefer aisle seats to window seats or if they always book a hotel when they fly. That information allows us to improve the customer experience. We’re also expanding our facial recognition technology to more customers. Right now, it’s only available in some regions or for certain customers. And we’re also exploring the metaverse and how we can engage our customers through games and rewards.
Learn more about how Mastercard works with airlines and other travel & hospitality companies.
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