The future of loyalty is no longer the same for everyone

For years, loyalty programmes in hospitality ran on a very simple, almost reassuring logic: you join, you accumulate, you climb a tier, you receive the benefits assigned to that level. Late check-out, upgrade if available, breakfast, points. A clear, readable structure — and fairly easy to explain.

The trouble is that this model is starting to fray at the edges. Not because loyalty programmes have stopped being useful — quite the opposite. But because guests are expecting less and less a standardised reward and more and more a treatment that actually makes sense for them, for their behaviour, for the type of trip they're taking, for the real value they bring to the brand.

To borrow a Gartner prediction: by 2030, one in five loyalty programmes will offer completely personalised benefits for individual members, rather than a universal list of perks identical for everyone.

In my view, this is one of the most interesting transformations to watch, because it touches marketing, CRM, customer experience, and technology all at once — and above all, the way a hotel decides to recognise and reward its best guests.

The old loyalty model is no longer enough

The most important line from Gartner analyst Brad Jashinsky's interview is probably this: the current loyalty framework is delivering neither the best customer experience nor the most profitable programme for brands.

It might sound provocative, but if you think about it, it perfectly describes what we see every day.

Traditional loyalty has two very obvious limitations:

• it offers the same benefits to people who behave very differently from one another;
• it rewards volume or frequency, but often grasps little of the real value of the relationship.

Consider two guests. One always books direct, travels off-season, spends well in-house, stays perhaps less often but with high margins. The other sleeps there frequently, but only comes through a discounted OTA, consumes nothing on property, and generates far lower profitability. In a traditional programme, they risk being treated similarly if the count is based almost exclusively on nights or gross spend.

This is where AI comes in — or rather, the intelligent use of data.

AI as the engine of personalised loyalty

According to Gartner, artificial intelligence will enable this shift by helping brands read behavioural, product and contextual data more effectively, so as to build far more relevant offers and benefits for each individual customer.

The promise is clear: fewer "same for everyone" benefits, more genuinely meaningful rewards. No longer just "you've reached level X, so you're entitled to Y," but a much more fluid and behavioural logic.

If a guest always travels with family, perhaps the right benefit isn't an upgrade to an executive room, but priority on connecting rooms or a more generous late check-out.

If another arrives frequently for work and always books last minute, a fast check-in, a flexible rate or genuinely useful business services might be worth more.

If someone lives near a logistics hub and costs less to serve, the threshold for accessing certain perks could also be lowered — as Gartner notes in the piece. But this is precisely where the delicate terrain of perceived fairness opens up.

Because the great advantage of personalisation is also its main risk: it can seem smarter, but also more opaque.

Personalise, yes — but without becoming creepy or unfair

This, in my opinion, is a decisive point, and Gartner makes it with considerable lucidity. Personalising too much, or doing it badly, is not automatically a good idea. A separate Gartner study from 2025 shows that 53% of customers experience some forms of personalisation negatively, and in those cases purchase regret increases and the propensity to buy again decreases.

This is something the tourism sector would do well to keep firmly in mind.

Because if a guest notices that another is receiving a lower benefit threshold, a better offer, or a privilege they're not getting — without understanding why — the perception can turn negative very quickly. And loyalty, which is supposed to strengthen the relationship, risks cracking it instead.

The point isn't simply to use more data. The point is to design personalisation that is perceived as useful, not arbitrary.

The travel sector is perfectly positioned for this evolution

In some respects, travel is one of the sectors best suited to personalised loyalty. McKinsey writes plainly that the travel and hospitality industry — which effectively invented modern loyalty — now needs to reinvent it, because customers have become more mobile, less brand-faithful, and more sensitive to the real value of the experience.

In tourism, we have an enormous number of useful signals at our disposal:

• frequency of stays;
• booking channel;
• average booking lead time;
• average length of stay;
• type of trip;
• ancillary spend;
• recurring requests;
• preferences expressed during the stay;
• seasonal patterns;
• post-stay feedback.

The problem, if anything, is that this data often lives in separate silos. PMS on one side, CRM on another, booking engine somewhere else, reputation on a separate platform, and perhaps the front office holding invaluable information in their heads that never gets recorded anywhere.

Gartner insists on exactly this: without breaking down silos and without a coherent strategy, AI-powered personalisation remains a promise, not a competitive advantage.

Hospitality is already moving in this direction

Even if fully personalised programmes are not yet the norm, the movement is already visible. Oracle Hospitality, in its materials and sector research, has long been pushing the construction of unified guest profiles that capture preferences, behaviours, communication styles and spend in order to offer more flexible and relevant loyalty programmes.

McKinsey, when discussing the future of hotels, already imagines properties that know the customer by name, anticipate preferences, and personalise the stay experience in far more granular ways.

The trouble is that between the vision and the day-to-day reality of many hotels — particularly independents — there is still a considerable gap.

And this is where things get very interesting for our market.

And independent hotels? They don't need to copy Marriott, but they do need to understand the logic

If you work in a chain with millions of members, loyalty and personalisation imply data science, automation, sophisticated segmentation, fintech integration, and advertising tie-ins.

If you run a boutique hotel, an independent city hotel, or a small family property, the temptation is to think none of this applies to you. I believe, on the contrary, that it applies enormously — just not in the way vendors usually pitch it.

For an independent hotel, personalised loyalty shouldn't start from a points programme that mimics the big chains. It should start from a much simpler question: how can I make a regular or promising guest feel recognised and valued, without treating them as a number and without creating perceived inequities?

That might mean:

• recognising guests who book direct and come back regularly;
• offering different benefits based on actual behaviour, not just spend;
• building small, consistent touches aligned with the guest's profile;
• using technology to remember and activate, not to overcomplicate.

Sometimes the most intelligent loyalty isn't a visible, structured programme at all. It's a combination of well-used CRM, personalised communication, upgrades made with genuine criteria, calibrated offers, and relational memory.

The real paradigm shift: from tier logic to relevance logic

To my mind, this is the core transformation.

We're moving from a tier-based logic to a relevance-based logic.

In the classic model, the brand says:

"Do enough for me, climb a tier, and you'll get this package of benefits."

In the emerging model, the brand should start saying:

"If I understand who you are and what you need, I can offer you something more fitting — and more profitable for both of us."

It's an enormous shift in perspective. And, if it works, it can also be economically healthier. Because it allows benefit costs to be allocated more effectively, cutting waste and irrelevant rewards.

It's no coincidence that Gartner talks about programmes that are more profitable for brands, not just more effective for customers.

What a hotel should be doing today to get ready

The temptation here would be to produce the usual operational checklist. Instead, I'll try to genuinely simplify.

1. Get the data in order

If you don't know who comes back, how they book, how much they spend, what they appreciate, what they complain about, you can't personalise anything sensibly. Before any AI tools, you need clean, connected data.

2. Understand which guests you actually want to retain

Not all repeat guests have the same value. Some come back but erode the margin. Others may visit less often but book direct, spend on property and say good things about you. Intelligent loyalty starts here.

3. Design benefits that are perceived as useful

Better a small but relevant perk than a standard privilege nobody cares about. Personalisation doesn't need to be spectacular. It needs to make sense.

4. Train the team to notice and record

Loyalty doesn't live only in software. It lives in the way staff observe, remember and share useful information. If the team isn't involved, the whole strategy stays theoretical.

5. Avoid "creepy" personalisation

If the guest senses we know too much, or that we're treating them in an apparently arbitrary way compared to others, the outcome can be counterproductive. This calls for tact, transparency and common sense.

In conclusion, loyalty in hospitality isn't disappearing. It's becoming more sophisticated, more personalised and potentially more intelligent. But it's not a revolution to be achieved by bolting on whatever AI feature is trending this quarter.

It's a transformation that demands better data, fewer silos, greater strategic clarity, and a very concrete reflection on what it actually means to "reward" a guest.

For the large chains, it will be a game of platforms, predictive models and integrated systems.

For independents, it will above all be a game of clear-headedness: understanding that the future of loyalty isn't about copying the universal benefits of the big players, but about building more relevant, more memorable relationships — using technology as support, not as an alibi.

And, when you think about it, that's actually good news. Because tourism has always worked better when it stops treating everyone the same way and starts seeing people for who they really are.