Guest Loyalty Programs

Guest loyalty programs are membership programs offered by hotels, auto clubs, and airlines to reward guest loyalty. These programs offer rate discounts, room upgrades, free nights, and other benefits to guests. Guests must belong to a membership program recognized by your hotel chain before membership benefits and awards can be applied to their stay. For example, your hotel has a guest loyalty program that awards guests based on the amount of revenue generated or the number of stays per year.

Membership Types

Guests often belong to membership programs offered by hotels, auto clubs, airlines, and so on. These memberships might offer discounts and other benefits to guests staying at your property. To apply membership privileges and awards to a guest stay, the guest must belong to a membership program recognized by your property.

Membership types enable you to identify, organize, and manage the membership programs on a profile. For example, your hotel might have a guest loyalty program that awards guests based on the amount of revenue generated or the number of stays per year. You would create a specific membership type for this program.

You can add membership types to a guest profile or to a reservation at booking or check-in. You can add more than one membership type to a profile, but you must designate one of the membership types as primary.

Each membership type has a membership type rule setup associated with it. Membership type rules determine the actions that result in membership award points and tier point accrual. One of two types of points, award points or tier points, can be defined for the membership program. Members redeem award points towards specific awards, and tier points are evaluated to determine membership tier / level upgrades and downgrades.

When creating a membership type, you can set an expiration date, and you can set up the membership to auto-generate membership numbers or require them to be manually entered for each new member.

Membership Tiers

Membership tiers are levels that classify memberships according to the amount and quality of business they generate. You can upgrade a member from a lower to a higher tier, or downgrade from a higher to a lower tier. The membership tier determines guest eligibility for specific awards. The higher the tier, the greater the awards. Members are upgraded or downgraded based on specific actions:

  • Number of stays booked by the member during a given period.

  • Number of nights the member was in residence during a given period.

  • Revenue generated by the member during a given period.

Membership Awards

You can define awards for your hotel’s guest loyalty program. This enables you to recognize and reward guest loyalty and encourage frequent stays throughout your chain. Each membership program can have its own special awards setup. For example, a loyalty membership program might upgrade a member to a higher tier or level once a required number of stays is reached.

Awards take the form of different award types, such as products (champagne, chocolates, flowers, or a spa treatment), special room rates, room upgrades, or other perks such as a choice of gifts from a third-party catalog. Membership awards must be based on the following award types:

  • Products: The award is a product, or package, such as champagne, chocolates, flowers, spa session, or golf privileges.

  • Rates: The award is a special room rate available to members.

  • Upgrades: The award takes the form of a room upgrade.

  • FT Payment: This award enables a guest to apply available membership points towards the balance of his or her bill.

  • Other: The award consists of a product or service offered by a third party, such as a selection from a gift catalogue.

Awards can be offered based on specific valid dates, the member's tier / level, and other factors. You can either manually issue awards to guests or automatically issue them. Typically, you automatically issue awards through an award batch job that is set up to periodically run.

Workflow

Figure 14-1 Guest Loyalty Program Setup Workflow

This figure shows the workflow when setting up a guest loyalty program.
In the workflow, setups occur in the following order:

  1. Primary Membership Type Setup: You must first create a membership type and set it as primary. You can then add additional features and details to the membership, such as the points calculation.

  2. Membership Card Details Setup: After you set up your primary membership type, you can configure the membership card details. You can set up the membership card so that a unique card number is generated and assigned to each new member who enrolls into the program.

  3. Membership Type Rules Setup: Membership type rules determine how the membership program accrues points for awards and membership level upgrades.

  4. Membership Tiers Setup: Tiers define the hierarchy for the membership program. You can define tier management rules to require a minimum number of stays, nights, and revenue for each tier. For example, the member must stay a certain number of nights per year to remain at the current tier or exceed that number to upgrade to the next tier. A member’s failure to meet the current tier’s requirements can result in a downgrade to a lower tier.

  5. Membership Awards Setup: Finally, you can create the specific awards for the guest loyalty program and define the point requirements for each award.

Parent topic: Client Relations Administration