The new frontier for loyalty: Engaging with leisure travelers

With the pandemic behind us, global air traffic continues to recover as the travel industry strengthens progressively.  

However, looking deeper we see that while there has been a recovery in leisure travel , which has surpassed pre COVID-19 levels, volumes in the business travel marketare not back to where they were. 

For those of us charged with assessing our industry, and where it might be headed, this puts a renewed focus on the leisure traveler and how to engage with them. 

The ‘occasional leisure traveler’ – who takes two-to-three trips each year – now constitutes the largest segment of the whole market, accounting for 53 per cent of total travel spent, industry-wide. However, these travelers are difficult to engage with, having just 1.1 interactions with a travel player each year.

Rethinking loyalty 

In this new world, traditional measures of engagement, such as ‘earn-and-burn’ loyalty schemes based on frequent interactions, are not enough. These…