Interested in a Broadway backstage tour, hard-to-get sports tickets or dinner at a booked-solid Michelin-starred restaurant, but don’t have deep pockets or connections?
Well, how many airline miles or credit card points do you have?
Airlines, banks and hotels are transforming formerly bread-and-butter loyalty programs, allowing members to spend points or miles to gild their everyday lives with experiences that money alone can’t always buy.
Members can score coveted World Cup tickets using American Airlines miles, book backstage tours at sold-out Broadway shows with Delta Air Lines miles or attend exclusive parties at film festivals with Chase points. They can get a seat at intimate multicourse dinners cooked by star chefs and pay for them with Capital One points or United Airlines miles.
Experts say that companies are betting big on experiences to help capture increasingly fickle travelers in a dizzyingly complex loyalty landscape. Customers can now choose from a wide range of programs and methods of earning points as well as book travel in more ways than ever before, including directly through credit card portals. At the same time, some programs have devalued points and cut benefits, souring members’ loyalty.
Experiences can help reel in new or wavering members by delighting them and offering them the chance to feel like V.I.P.s, while giving them more opportunities to use their points along the way.
“Travel brands and banks are shifting toward lifestyle positioning,” said Erifili Gounari, the chief executive and founder of the Z Link, a marketing agency focused on younger generations. “Not just ‘Fly with us’ or ‘Bank with us,’ but ‘Here’s how we help you live well, explore more and access the world.’”
Wooing Travelers ‘on All Fronts’
The chance to enjoy a high-end experience drew Jen Espinal, 41, to a Chase Sapphire Reserve-sponsored roller-skating party in October in New York City. For under 10,000 points, Ms. Espinal and other card members joined celebrities like Cher and the dance pop duo Sofi Tukker at Faena, a new hotel in the meatpacking district.
“It gets you adjacent to the places that aren’t in our everyday life,” said Ms. Espinal, who is from New Jersey, as she sipped champagne with a friend in the cordoned-off V.I.P. area. “This helps you experience a city in a different way even if you’re a local person.”
Miles- and points-based loyalty programs began with airlines not long after the deregulation of the industry, in the late 1970s. American Airlines started AAdvantage, one of the first frequent-flier programs, in 1981. Rewards for members of the program, which was then by invitation only, included a first-class ticket to any of American’s destinations. Hotels quickly followed suit; Holiday Inn started the first hotel loyalty program in 1983, granting members points for stays.
Today, members can rack up points for a range of activities that have little to do with flights or hotel stays. In addition to earning points for everyday purchases on credit cards, travelers can, for example, get United miles for taking a Lyft, collect Marriott Bonvoy points for ordering Uber Eats or amass extra rewards for drinking Starbucks when flying Delta.
Loyalty has turned out to be lucrative. Revenue from these programs provides a major source of profit for airlines, which sell their miles to banks. In 2024, American and Delta each received about $7 billion from frequent-flier programs, according to an analysis of financial filings by Jay Sorensen, who runs IdeaWorksCompany, an airline consulting firm.
While companies can be coy about membership figures, major loyalty programs count hundreds of millions of members worldwide. Marriott’s Bonvoy program has nearly 260 million members, the company said in its most recent financial earnings. Delta reported in 2023 that it had more than 130 million SkyMiles members.
With the stakes so high, airlines, hotels, online travel agencies and banks are all vying to differentiate themselves. “Travelers are being wooed on all fronts,” Mr. Sorensen said in a statement. “The competition is creating better rewards, more lounges and new travel booking options, but it’s also reshaping the balance of power in the travel industry.”
‘Off the Charts’ Experiences
Loyalty programs have come up with a dazzling variety of offerings, many centered on major sporting and cultural events such as Miami Art Week, the Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Sundance Film Festival, the U.S. Open tennis tournament and the Coachella music and art festival.
“We need to be in these premium attention-getting environments,” said Elizabeth Rutledge, the chief marketing officer of American Express, adding, “Gen Zers and millennials are citing things like entertainment and sports experiences as really the reason why they want to join Amex.”
That trend extends across the entire industry. Recent data shows that travelers are willing to spend more on experiences as well as to let experiences influence their choice of destination.
One common theme involves offering experiences that money can’t buy, like batting practice at Daikin Park, home of the Houston Astros, for 12,000 United miles. Or a Chase Sapphire Reserve-sponsored trip to Switzerland that lets you hit the slopes with the Olympic gold medalist Shaun White — that one is a bit more costly at 1.5 million points (or $15,500, if you want to pay cash), in addition to the card’s $795 annual fee. Other loyalty programs stoke excitement by auctioning experiences.
Hutch Pegler, 53, flies for work nearly every week and typically accumulates miles to use on family trips. But in May, he jumped at the chance to bid on a two-night stay in Dallas that included four hours in an American Airlines Boeing 787 simulator. He won the auction, spending more than one million miles.
“I love to fly and I love the airline business,” said Mr. Pegler, who lives in Connecticut. “This whole experience was off the charts,” he added.
While operating events and experiences is not a “for-profit entity,” said Chris Reagan, president of Chase Branded Cards, both Chase and its customers benefit.
“Delighting them over the long run is great for business. We want happy customers,” he said. “Happy customers stay longer; they spend more.”
Angling for Gen Z
Data shows that Gen Z travelers are less likely to belong to a loyalty program, so those programs are working hard to bring them into the fold. Social-media-driven tactics like limited drops, sweepstakes and scavenger hunts aim to capitalize on the fear of missing out, sometimes with no miles or points required.
Delta recently started a new Group Drop sweepstakes, which SkyMiles members can enter to win free trips with their friends. The airline teased the new program on Instagram days before revealing the full details on the SkyMiles Experiences website.
Last summer, Alaska Airlines debuted Atmos Rewards Unlocked, its experiences platform, which includes both auctions and buy-now options like a behind-the-scenes tour of an Alaska airplane hangar at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (5,000 points). Brett Catlin, a vice president at the airline, said the move was partly driven by a motivation to “build relevance with a younger cohort” and “offer more approachable and achievable redemptions” at different price points.
Companies are experimenting with other ways to grab Gen Z’s attention. Marriott occasionally releases experiences that can be redeemed for one point; members need to follow the company’s social media channels for alerts. In 2024, the hotel operator held a sweepstakes for tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour that netted almost a million new members, said Peggy Roe, Marriott’s chief customer officer. And last fall, more than 150,000 people entered to win Delta’s first Group Drop, a free trip to Costa Rica and a visit to a Starbucks coffee farm, said an airline spokeswoman, adding that 70 SkyMiles members were selected.
“For Gen Z especially, experiences outweigh material perks, so offering once-in-a-lifetime access” like Taylor Swift seats or Broadway backstage tours “turns a loyalty program into a sort of cultural passport,” Ms. Gounari of the Z Link agency said.
In October, Ally Chiu, a 26-year-old living in New York, raced around Manhattan on a scavenger hunt and waited an hour to snag $50 tickets to an Olivia Rodrigo concert hosted by Amex for holders of its $895-a-year Platinum card.
Ultimately, she saw Ms. Rodrigo, one of her favorite singers, perform from just feet away.
“It made me realize this is why we pay the amount we pay so that we can reap these benefits,” said Ms. Chiu, who works in finance. “It was so worth it.”
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Christine Chung is a Times reporter covering airlines and consumer travel.
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