In today’s crowded and competitive loyalty landscape, loyalty programs face a critical inflection point. Members expect more than transactional value; they also want experiences that resonate more deeply. This presents challenges and opportunities for brands looking to differentiate their loyalty offerings—and AI may hold the key to addressing both.
The Challenge: Offering the Experiences Loyalty Members Crave
Let’s start with the hard part: making any change to a rewards program, particularly an established program with a sizable member base, can be both resource-intensive and strategically precarious. Transitions take time, and the cost of modifying central program components or shifting overall approaches can be massive. Disruptions, even positive ones, can risk alienating a portion of your membership.
The logistical hurdles are equally significant. Forging supplier relationships to offer custom experiences to all members across status levels is daunting for any loyalty program. The big three travel rewards—flights, hotels, and car rentals—are content that is relatively simple to source. Securing exclusive experiences, however, requires different expertise. Most programs and their traditional travel partners aren't equipped to identify, distribute, and deliver this specialized inventory at scale.
But the reward is worth the risk. As consumers increasingly prioritize experiences, your loyalty program should explore efficient ways to introduce experiential offerings or present experiential rewards or booking options to the right members at the right time. For many programs, this might include introducing bookable travel, even if they don't have a points-based loyalty framework to support redemptions.
Simply making travel purchases available creates an experiential option for members and helps set a program apart from its peers that offer only basic discounts. AI can be instrumental in helping your program emphasize experiences in your member interactions and overall value proposition.
Why Experiences Matter
In the context of loyalty programs, transactional value is commonplace, as are base-level travel rewards. Even programs with travel rewards face consumers shifting their preferences toward experiences, specifically whole-trip, experience-centric travel. This is most pronounced among younger generations.
The market signals are clear: Experiences now drive consumer choices in unprecedented ways. According to Skift's State of Travel report, 74% of consumers view experiences as having a moderate to massive impact on shaping their trips. Even more telling, the experiential travel market is projected to surpass $3.1 trillion in 2024, underscoring the economic weight behind this consumer preference.
Loyalty programs must adapt by offering experiential rewards that reflect the full spectrum of today's travel motivations. This evolution demands a fundamental rethinking of the value proposition, particularly for programs primarily structured around discounts, points accumulation, or conventional travel bookings.
Growing Role of AI in Loyalty Programs
But how can programs pivot to a more experience-centric loyalty offering? Artificial intelligence may be the answer. AI presents a powerful solution to the challenges of implementing experiential rewards, partly due to consumers’ increasing acceptance of it.
Our recent Tipping Point for Loyalty 2025 Report Series found that 47% of US consumers have already used AI to plan travel within their loyalty program, with families (64%) significantly outpacing households without children (42%). This represents a dramatic increase from just 15% the previous year. A MoneyLion Travel and AI Trends report further confirms this trend, finding that 70% of Americans are using, planning to use, or are open to using AI to plan their trips this year.
Consumer comfort with AI extends beyond travel, with 64% of Millennials and 65% of Gen Z reporting AI use for online purchases. Despite this consumer readiness, many loyalty programs struggle with—or are hesitant about—implementing this technology. Our Tipping Point research also revealed that while 45% of businesses identified "finding optimal ways to integrate AI into their loyalty strategy" as a top challenge, "more AI capabilities" ranked 11th among investment priorities. This disconnect highlights a strategic opportunity for forward-thinking loyalty programs to gain a competitive advantage through AI adoption, through its ability to personalize the member experience and automation-driven efficiency gains.
Leveraging AI to Create Dynamic Experiential Content
AI can transform how loyalty programs present experiential content to members. Rather than static offerings that appeal to the average member (and truly satisfy few), AI enables dynamic content generation based on individual interests and past behavior. This means you can present the right experiential rewards to the right members at precisely the right moment.
AI and machine learning can also be leveraged to extract actionable insights from loyalty member transactional and profile data, creating the foundation for authentic personalization. This is crucial for creating dynamic content that resonates with individual members rather than broad segments.
If your program is looking to introduce experiential elements without overhauling your entire rewards structure, AI offers a pathway to incremental implementation. An AI-enabled travel platform can help establish new supplier connections, dramatically expanding the diversity of rewards available for personalized experiences.
Finally, the technology can identify which members are most likely to respond to experiential offerings and which experiences align with their demonstrated preferences, minimizing risk while maximizing engagement. This capability transforms how programs can approach experiential rewards, making them both more accessible and more effective.
The iSeatz AI Advantage
At iSeatz, our platform continually evolves to meet pressing challenges like these. We have helped some of the world's best-recognized brands create highly engaging rewards programs that drive true differentiation. As a specialist in travel technology, we offer a flexible and configurable platform that integrates multiple data and supplier sources. This enables your brand to deliver the tailored experiences and experiential travel content your members want—and achieve the differentiation you need to compete.
The loyalty landscape is approaching a new horizon as members shift toward prioritizing experiences alongside traditional rewards. AI can be an impactful enabler for programs willing to navigate this shift, providing both the analytical capabilities to understand member preferences and the delivery mechanisms to present personalized experiential rewards.
The brands that succeed in this new era will recognize that experiences aren't merely an addition to their offering—they represent a core differentiator that can transform transactional relationships into meaningful, lasting connections.
With the right technology partner like iSeatz, loyalty programs can navigate this transition successfully, delivering the experiential value that drives true program differentiation and competitive advantage in an increasingly experience-driven marketplace.
Discover how iSeatz can help your brand differentiate itself through experiential travel content today.
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To learn more about our work with travel and financial services brands and their loyalty programs, contact us here.