Your Points Programme is Not a Loyalty Programme.

Here is the uncomfortable truth most loyalty teams quietly know but rarely say aloud: what most brands call a loyalty programme is actually a discount engine with a badge on it. Customers collect. Customers redeem. Customers move on. And that is not loyalty. It is arbitrage.

I have spent years working inside airline and hospitality programmes, and the moment that reoriented everything for me was simple. We were celebrating hitting 20 million members in Emirates Skywards. The number was real. The loyalty, in many cases, was not. Membership and loyalty are not the same thing, and confusing the two is expensive. You can have 20 million members and a churn problem at the same time.

The brands that genuinely retain customers do not lead with points. They lead with recognition and with memory. With the small, repeated signal that says: we know you, and we are glad you are back. That is not a technical problem. It is a human one, and it requires a different brief entirely. The brief is not 'how do we make the programme more rewarding?' It is 'how do we make the customer feel more known?'

When we launched My Family as a new capability within Skywards, the insight was not about earning rates or tier thresholds. It was about the fact that a family travelling together is a fundamentally different emotional transaction than a frequent business traveller. A parent managing two children through an airport at 6am is not thinking about the points or Miles they will earn. They are thinking about how they can avoid someone in the group having a meltdown before they all reach the departure gate. The programme that meets them there, that removes friction, that makes the whole thing feel considered rather than just processed, that is the one they come back to. The lever was not a mathematical one. It was about making parents feel seen and heard. And revenue followed because the relationship did.

The mistake most programmes make is optimising for the metric that is easiest to defend in a boardroom or senior management meeting. Active members. Redemption rates. Cost per point issued. These are real numbers and they matter, but they measure programme activity, not actual customer attachment. A customer who redeems their points and then quietly disappears to a competitor has contributed to your redemption rate and subtracted from the business. So celebrating that is a category error.

There is also a structural problem that nobody wants to name. Many loyalty programmes are built by finance teams rather than marketing ones, because the liability sits on the balance sheet. That shapes everything: the incentives, the language, the definition of success. When the people designing the emotional architecture of your customer relationship are primarily concerned with liability management, the customer can feel it. Maybe not consciously. But they can feel it.

The brands getting this right are not necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated technology or the highest earn rates. Rather, they are the ones who have asked the harder question first: why should someone (anyone!) feel something (anything!) about us?

Points fund behaviour. They can make a customer do something once. But relationships change behaviour. They make a customer choose you by default, recommend you unprompted, and even forgive you when you get something wrong. Until the brief starts there, the programme is just an expensive way to buy customers that you don't actually keep.