Consider your financial institution’s 2025 priorities. Where does differentiating your rewards program rank? Loyalty programs - a stalwart of credit card strategy - have become so ubiquitous they are now essentially indistinguishable across institutions. The path to meaningful differentiation remains elusive yet more critical than ever.
While most banks have invested heavily in rewards, the incremental improvements often feel hollow. Refreshed point multipliers and tweaked redemption options barely register with consumers who have grown numb to rewards marketing. The real opportunity lies in moving these table stakes to create genuine value that captures attention and drives spending.
Experiential travel content is one way to achieve this differentiation. Travel-based experiences, including excursions and live events, but also more exclusive activities like VIP access to concerts or private dining opportunities, have proven to be highly effective motivators of loyalty behavior. In other industries, programs like Marriott’s Bonvoy have distinguished themselves by leaning into experiential content (see the highly successful Bonvoy Moments initiative). Most card issuers haven't embraced this strategy, even though precisely these memorable moments could transform their rewards programs.
Looking at the massive opportunity, why is that? According to Skift, the experiential travel market was set to surpass $3.1 trillion in 2024. Few institutions are better positioned to seize this market than banks, yet most have barely scratched the surface.
Perhaps the biggest reason is that making any change to a rewards program of this scale is like turning a battleship: transitions take time, and innovation is difficult to achieve alone. The cost of modifying central program components or shifting overall strategies can be massive, and the threat of upsetting your customer base (or a critical customer segment) is an unignorable risk.
Another reason is logistical: financial institutions may lack the technology partner or the internal capacity to establish supplier relationships to offer truly custom experiences across customer tiers. While decades-old distribution networks make booking flights, hotels, and traditional options straightforward, securing exclusive content experiences requires different expertise. Most banks and their traditional travel partners aren't equipped to source and deliver this specialized inventory at scale.
We continually evolve our platform to meet pressing loyalty challenges like these and have helped some of the world’s best-recognized financial institutions create highly engaging rewards programs that drive true differentiation. As a specialist in loyalty technology, we offer a flexible and configurable platform that integrates multiple data and supplier sources. This enables your financial brand to deliver the tailored experiences and experiential travel content your members want—and achieve the differentiation you need to compete.
Like most financial institutions and card issuers, your four key cardholder segments are most likely mass market, mass affluent, high-net-worth, and ultra-high-net-worth individuals. These segments all see great value in experiences when considering travel; Skift’s State of Travel report finds that 74% view experiences as having a moderate to massive impact on shaping their trips. But when assessing loyalty program engagement, spending, and travel booking behaviors, each segment will also be motivated by different types and calibers of experiences.
Most financial institution rewards programs support some reward categories that are typically characterized as “experiences.” In our State of Loyalty: 2024 Credit Card Rewards report, an annual analysis of the credit card rewards landscape, we found over three-quarters (76%) of major credit card programs offer point redemption or a statement credit for tours and activities, an increase of more than 20 percentage points over 2023. More than half (56%) offer the same for live events.
But with only one experiential travel supplier—or just a handful—these programs are limited in the diversity and quality of experiences they can offer each of their cardholder segments. This can disproportionally impact the more discerning high and ultra-high-net-worth customers you want to engage.
Consider a reward activity like a sunset cruise in Key West, which, through one supplier, is a two-hour tour on a catamaran with a bottle of wine included. This might be a delightful experience for a mass-market cardholder and a nice way to redeem a few hundred points. But what would resonate with a platinum-tier cardholder is access to a captained yacht share service and a private slip adjacent to Mallory Square. Similar activities, but not always possible to source from the same supplier.
We have found that providing a wide range of content – in other words, the catamaran and the yacht – to meet the needs of each segment is the best way to meet cardholders’ demand for engaging experiences. With access to the appropriate cardholder activity and preference data, the right experiential options can be presented to the right segments at the right time to maximize redemptions and bookings.
If the advantage is establishing the right supplier relationships to offer a robust portfolio of experiential travel rewards, why not acquire a travel inventory consolidator or existing online travel agency? Or forge those supplier relationships yourself, and build the booking technology to support them? The fact is few financial institutions have the resources (or the will) to spend hundreds of millions to buy an OTA with the capacity to serve its member base. Fewer still have any intention of building something on that scale.
Instead, the optimal approach is to establish strategic partnerships—partners who are actual partners and students of the travel and loyalty space. This kind of partner can help with segmentation, marketing, and program structure—not just tech providers. Our decades of industry expertise have led us to the conclusion that forging strategic partnerships is the most effective way to offer compelling experiential content and satisfy members’ growing appetites for enriching travel experiences.
Even with the right partner, the success of an experiential travel content strategy comes down to data. You have a wealth of cardholder data at your disposal that you can leverage to provide tailored experiential content to cardholder segments that are most likely to react to and engage with it, but you need a partner who can responsibly manage and utilize that data. The right partner will understand your segmentation, offer advice on activating them with experiences, and then customize, package, and dynamically present experiential rewards to those segments. But to do so, they will need access to spend, customer intent, and third-party data.
As an extension of your loyalty technology stack, our platform uses AI and machine learning to get the most accurate, actionable insights from that data and transform them into bookings and increased spending.
AI and machine learning can also help tap into cardholders’ emotional triggers if you understand how they plan and book travel. For example, younger generations find inspiration for (and purchase) their travel differently than their parents' generations did. Most travelers are using social media channels as their preferred online sources for trip planning, according to both Skift and our internal research, but Millennials and Gen Z are influenced extensively by Instagram (the #1 social site for trip planning among 25-34-year-olds) and TikTok (24% of 18-24-year-olds prefer this channel, the largest percentage in the Skift study).
In this age of experiences, financial institutions must make the right strategies and loyalty technology choices to stand apart. Can your loyalty platform integrate AI functionality to predict their browsing behavior and automatically present an experiential option they would not only likely book but that will delight them, too?
We can help you answer that question with a resounding “yes.” Find out how iSeatz can help your financial brand differentiate itself through experiential travel content—contact us today.
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To learn more about our work with travel and financial services brands and their loyalty programs, contact us here.