Business of Loyalty: What the Travel Industry Could Learn From Amazon Prime

Editor's Note: Skift's Business Traveler newsletter is now the Business of Loyalty newsletter. In this weekly missive, we'll bring you the same insight into what matters most to the people who travel for a living, but now with an added focus on how airlines, hotels, and credit card programs battle for their attention and their business — a points geek with a Ph.D. of sorts. While we are still looking at how these moves impact the consumer, the focus is on what the industry is doing to win their loyalty. The newsletter is being written by Grant Martin, who you've come to know as the author of our Business Traveler newsletter over the last three years. He'll be able to take advantage of contributions from Skift editors including Brian Sumers (airlines), Deanna Ting (hotels), and Sean O'Neill (travel tech) to better explain what's happening with loyalty right now. We hope you'll stick with it, and we promise to never devalue your reading experience. Amazon Is a "Prime" Example of a Smart Loyalty Program It has become cliché to say travel companies can learn from the success of Amazon Prime. Yet there's still truth to it -- particularly for online travel agencies, airlines, hotels, and cruise lines. Amazon famously spotted a lucrative opportunity to improve the way it treats its most loyal customers by creating a subscription service. What began as an offer of free two-day shipping in exchange for a $99-a-year has morphed into a package of services that includes movie and music streaming, online photo storage, and more. Amazon is estimated to have at least 50 million Prime members. A "Prime" lesson for online travel players is that they should pinpoint what their best customers want the most and build their membership program to reflect those things. For online travel agencies, this may mean re