The Best Idea For Your Loyalty Programme Isn't In Another Retailer's App

When refreshing a loyalty programme, retail and travel-retail businesses will typically benchmark against competitors. While this is a reasonable approach, it often leads to repetitive ideas across the industry.

While working through a global travel-retail operator's loyalty strategy, Mindera found it more useful to start off reviewing businesses that have nothing to do with travel retail, yet have metrics and proven mechanics that work. This is a habit worth building into your own strategy process: the freshest approach rarely comes from the company you already benchmark against every quarter in your industry.

Three mechanics, three different categories

The first insightful mechanic was modelled on Amazon Prime. Specifically on the well-documented fact that Prime members spend roughly twice as much per year as non-members. Translated into this operator's context, it became a paid membership tier, priced in the region of €49 to €69 a year, offering fast-lane checkout, gate delivery, paperless returns, premium in-airport Wi-Fi and a small sustainability discount. The target wasn't loyalty sentiment in the abstract. It was a concrete spend-per-passenger uplift, informed by what a comparable paid-membership mechanic has already demonstrated elsewhere.

Modelled on Starbucks' drive-thru model, where over 30% of drinks are ordered via mobile before pickup, the second mechanic introduced a pre-order-and-collect flow in airports. Travellers reserve perfume or spirits at security kiosks for gate delivery before boarding. This target audience rarely visits the store, allowing a proven convenience strategy to capture passengers missed by traditional retail.

The third mechanic was modelled on Peloton’s 96% subscriber retention rate, driven by leaderboards and badges. Travel-retail and sustainability adopted this gamification mechanic and introduced a daily ranking of “CO₂ avoided” per passenger, allowing users to exchange points for lounge upgrades and encouraging sustainable travel choices.

What this means for any retailer building or refreshing a loyalty scheme

None of these three ideas transfer automatically, and that's exactly the point. A mechanic that keeps someone opening a fitness app every morning needs real adaptation before it works for someone shopping in an airport once every few months: the frequency, the stakes and the emotional context are all different. The value in this approach isn't blanket copying the mechanic; it's the discipline of identifying one with proven economics somewhere else, then doing the deliberate work of translating it. Identifying what changes about the customer's context, what stays the same about the underlying psychology, and what the realistic version of the metric looks like once it's adapted.

That's a repeatable exercise for any loyalty or product team, in any sector, not a one-off flash of inspiration specific to one client. The starting question worth asking in any loyalty strategy session is less "what are our competitors doing" and more "what mechanic, proven anywhere, could plausibly work here if we did the translation properly."

Notice what these three examples have in common beyond their categories: each one targets a different point of friction rather than a generic "more points" instinct. The membership-tier mechanic targets frequency and habitual spend. The pre-order flow targets a segment that avoids the shop floor altogether. The leaderboard targets sustained engagement between purchases, when a customer has no obvious reason to think about the brand at all. Treating "which mechanic, from where" as three separate questions, each aimed at a specific behaviour you're actually trying to shift, is what keeps this exercise from collapsing into a generic wishlist of gamification features.

Often, direct competitors are a narrow and stale source of loyalty ideas, because everyone is looking at the same handful of programmes and arriving at similar answers. The more interesting material tends to sit just outside the category, in businesses that have already proven a mechanic works, waiting for someone to do the work of translating it properly.

Key takeaways

• Some of the strongest loyalty mechanics we explored for a travel-retail operator were adapted from outside travel retail entirely: Amazon Prime, Starbucks, and Peloton.
• Amazon Prime members spend roughly 2x per year versus non-members, the basis for a proposed paid, perks-based membership tier.
• Over 30% of Starbucks beverages are now mobile-ordered ahead of pickup, the basis for a pre-order-and-collect model aimed at travellers who'd otherwise skip the shop entirely.
• Peloton retains 96% of subscribers through leaderboards and badges, the basis for a gamified sustainability-tracking mechanic.
• The real skill is the translation work: identifying what changes and what stays the same when a mechanic moves from its original context into yours.

If you're refreshing your loyalty strategy and want to explore what mechanics from outside your category could translate well, we're always glad to think it through together.