Loyalty Programs Are Influencing Travelers More Than Ever. So Why Are They Defecting?
New research from Skift covering nearly 7,000 travelers across five global regions reveals a striking disconnect: loyalty programs are shaping booking decisions more powerfully than at any point in the past decade, yet the customers they work hardest to retain show declining genuine allegiance. The findings, released May 4, 2026, point to a structural problem that travel merchants and platform operators can no longer afford to ignore.
The Numbers Behind the Disconnect
Skift’s research, conducted across Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and North America, found that travel intent varies by as much as 25 percentage points between the most and least enthusiastic regions. MENA leads at 86% intent to travel, while European travelers trail at 61% — despite being historically reliable customers for the industry.
The more alarming signal for operators is what the data says about loyalty program effectiveness. Travelers report that loyalty programs continue to influence which brand they consider first. But once that initial decision is made, the same travelers show increasing willingness to defect if the redemption experience disappoints them, or if a competitor has a marginally better earning rate on a single trip.
That means operators who have invested heavily in loyalty infrastructure may be generating top-of-funnel awareness without translating it into the repeat business that makes those programs economically viable.
What This Means for Merchants and Operators
The executive angle here is straightforward. Loyalty programs are functioning as sophisticated top-of-funnel marketing tools — expensive, high-maintenance, and capable of directing consumer attention. But their second job, which is to lock customers into repeat behavior and suppress price sensitivity, is performing below historical norms.
For travel merchants, this has concrete operational implications. First, the cost of acquiring a loyal customer through program spend is rising even as the retention value of that status declines. Second, the data suggests that travelers are increasingly making booking decisions based on real-time earning rates and redemption flexibility rather than historical relationships. Third, the regions driving the most growth (MENA, parts of Asia) are also the regions where legacy loyalty programs have the least established infrastructure — which means the next wave of loyalty-driven revenue may require a fundamentally different design.
Operators who treat loyalty programs purely as a retention mechanic may be underinvesting in the first-touch experience. The evidence suggests the margin for error in that first interaction — the one that determines whether a traveler books again or walks — is getting tighter.
The Fintech Connection
The broader context for this trend sits at the intersection of loyalty and fintech. Travel platforms are increasingly embedding payment and loyalty functionality into a single seamless flow, treating checkout as the final step of a relationship rather than the end of a transaction. That architectural shift is putting pressure on traditional mileage-based programs, which were designed for a world where the airline or hotel was the primary transaction partner, not one node in a multi-platform booking journey.
For merchants operating at scale, the practical question is not whether to engage with loyalty infrastructure, but how to design a program that generates genuine behavioral lock-in rather than simply influencing which brand appears first in a search result. The data suggests those are no longer the same thing.
