A Look Behind The Curtain of Loyalty and Rewards Programs

Posted by bryan on October 6, 2013 in E-Business, E-Government with No Comments

English: Different customer loyality cards (airlines, car rental companies, hotels etc.) Photo credit: Wikipedia

Loyalty Cards, Rewards Programs, Points Incentives, Bonus Offers and Repeat-purchase punch cards, oh how I despise thee. You’ve probably been there too. You drop your wallet and have to spend the next 10 minutes embarrassingly picking up all your various credit cards, debit cards, loyalty cards, etc; or, maybe you’ve been in line to pay for something and had dig through your wallet in a cold sweat (for what felt like hours to the people behind you) holding up the line, looking for that punch-card or rewards card?

Imagine if this was no longer a reality and we all had a single unified points system which could arbitrate the various rules, policies, conditions and points earnings/accumulation schemes of the various points systems. Also, imagine if you could actually put your “points” to work for you and actualyl get some decent rewards?

This is something we are working on here at BCmoney MobileTV for rewarding your web activity and participation in the community. It is a long-running experiment but we feel as though we’ll figure it out eventually!

In the meantime, it helps to know about how some of the current rewards systems work and just how they cheat you out of your hard-earned money, along with your personal information right down to where you live and what types of products you buy, thereby destroying any hopes at anonymity, privacy and true customer satisfaction.

NOTE:
A good site for choosing through the hundreds of rewards credit cards and programs:

Aeroplan

Founded in 1984, Air Canada spun off its own internal frequent-flyer incentive program “AirCanda Aeroplan” unto its own independent subsidiary company in 2002.

http://milepoint.com/forums/wiki/earning-miles-on-aeroplan/

http://thoughtsfrommylife.com/article-92-Aeroplan_versus_Air_Miles_-_Comparing_Them

In general:
$1 = 1 Aeroplan Mile

But don’t think for a minute that means that every dollar you spend equates to an actual dollar worth of flights, merchandise, gift cards or redeemable cash you’ll get from Aeroplan. The actual value of each Aeroplan Mile is approximately 1.6 cents, and can be calculated as follows:

$frac{P}{A - (T + F)}$

P = Full (regular) Price of Flight
A = Price of same flight in Aeroplan pts.
T = Taxes
F = Fees

For a complete listing of Aeroplan miles redemption required for flights between cities, see the following *unofficial* spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlRQNDqujB6idGhpTUNjeW5KVXlJMEh0ZE5XdlR6TXc&hl=en#gid=17

Air Miles

Air Miles was created by British company Loyalty Management Group (LMG), which licenses local rights to the concept to various operators in different countries.

How many Air Miles you earn at each retailer for every dollar

http://thoughtsfrommylife.com/article-15-Collecting_Air_Miles_and_their_Value

Behind the Curtain

Now the promised peek behind the curtain of both these loyalty and rewards programs, with this corporate timeline straight from AIMIA’s Investor Relations site:

Aeroplan and Air Miles one and the same...