We are all celebrating the wrong things.
The numbers look great, don’t they? 83% of program owners love their loyalty programs. Up year-over-year. A staggering 83% also believe their members feel valued.
Flip the coin.
Only 56% of members feel valued.
Seventy-four percent of loyalty members “quiet quit” within two months of joining. They don’t leave. They don’t cancel. They just… stop. Only about 3% bother to actually opt-out. The silence is deafening, and marketers are still partying in the lobby.
Antavo’s Global Consumer Loyalty report spells out this disconnect. We are gaming the metrics because it is easy.
Think about hotels touting millions of members. Those aren’t fans. That is just people clicking a box for a 2% “member discount” so they don’t have to walk away empty-handed. Airlines? They sign up passengers for free wifi access. The email hits a database. That isn’t engagement. It’s just data entry.
We keep measuring success with total membership numbers and points earned. These are vanity metrics. Easy to inflate with auto-enrollment and one-click checkout apps.
Stephanie Meltzer-Pul, former exec at Starwood Preferred Guest, gets it. We are measuring the wrong thing.
But let’s talk about Starbucks. The poster child for modern loyalty? No. It’s a dumpster fire masquerading as a win.
Starbucks announced their new 60-stars reward (a $2 gift card, roughly) is now their most popular redemption. It accounts for 60% of total redemptions.
Is this a win?
No. It is a consumer confession.
People are not trusting the brand anymore. They used to save up for big, aspirational rewards. They played the long game. Now? Award charts shift. Values get devalued in stealthy updates. Points exist today but are worthless tomorrow. So members took the exit. They redeemed their low-value points for instant cash-equivalent value and checked out emotionally.
That is not loyalty. That is liquidation.
Starbucks revamped the program to give everyone less value. The new “top tier” elite status? It gives you what general members got before. Not an upgrade. A lateral move disguised as gold plating.
The app? Great for finding stores. Terrible for loyalty. Anyone chasing stars at this point isn’t a customer; they’re just making poor life choices based on bad incentives.
Intertemporal Trust
Loyalty is inherently intertemporal.
Brands ask for behavior first. You spend now, you hope for value later. It requires trust.
This is why co-brand credit cards are so expensive to acquire. Companies front the bonus. They give you a tangible reward upfront so you don’t have to take their word on future value. It proves the decision was right, immediately.
Stealth devaluations kill this. Repeatedly eroding value destroys the contract. And when trust goes, costs go up. You have to bribe customers more aggressively because the relationship is broken.
Partnerships should not be bolted on like barnacles on a hull. A true mobile ecosystem captures value by being useful. Not just for checking in, but for living.
Look at United Airlines. Their app gets praised, but mostly by people who have already booked a trip. It’s a ticket portal, not a life tool. Loyalty is treated as a B2B relationship between brand and partner. The customer is an afterthought, a data point to be passed around silos.
Imagine if American Airlines rebuilt their app customer-first.
Instead of sending you to AAdvantage eShopping, then to SimplyMiles, then back to the airline… the starting point would be simple: What do you want to buy?
The app knows your preferences. It aggregates offers from partners into a single view. Elite members get the better deal automatically. The friction vanishes. The ecosystem breathes.
Bilt Rewards is clumsy now. Growing fast means growing messy. Only some partners transact inside the app. But it comes closest to this ideal in the U.S. market. I find myself in Bilt more than any other loyalty app. Checking card spend, redeeming offers, booking travel. They have restaurant partners that let you pay inside the app. They even let you pay for someone else’s Lyft ride or pickup their check at a dinner.
American Express is close too. One app for finances, benefits, lounge access.
What ties them together is the starting premise. A strong value proposition first. Then a tool to maximize it.
Bilt is building an ecosystem that covers home to away and everything in between. The value grows with engagement.
Maybe they don’t realize what they have.
They stumbled into a high-engagement vehicle while the rest of the industry was asleep at the wheel. Complacent. Celebrating total member counts while the real users quietly quit.
The question is whether anyone else will wake up in time to see the lights going out.
