Earning Loyalty at New Heights: WestJet’s Upgraded Rewards Program

Paula: Hello, and welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, a show for loyalty marketing professionals.

Paula: I’m Paula Thomas, the founder and CEO of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, where we feature insightful conversations with loyalty professionals from the world’s leading brands.

Paula: Today’s episode is part of the Wiser Loyalty Series and is hosted by Bill Hanifin, Chief Executive Officer of the Wise Marketer Group.

Paula: The Wise Marketer Group is a media, education and advisory services company, providing resources for loyalty marketeers through the Wise Marketer Digital Publication, and the Loyalty Academy Programme that offers the Certified Loyalty Marketing Professional or CLMP designation.

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Bill: Hello, everyone, I’m Bill Hanifin, I’m the managing editor of The Wise Marketer and I’m here for Wiser Loyalty Podcast, which is a series produced in partnership between Let’s Talk Loyalty and The Wise Marketer.

Bill: And my guest today is Steve McClelland, who’s vice president of Loyalty at WestJet.

Bill: Steve, how are you?

Bill: I’m great.

Steve: Thanks, Bill.

Bill: Good, good.

Bill: There’s a lot to talk about here and I want to get right to it.

Bill: So you just made some incredible announcements, I know, because we were fortunate to be able to publish some of it on The Wise Marketer.

Bill: But I think it would be a really good place to start just as a foundation, just to make sure everybody understands WestJet’s position in the market, because you’re in a obviously Canadian airline, you’ve got another big airline that’s been there a while, and you’re competing in a tough market.

Bill: So you’ve got a specific position carved out, you had a frequent flyer program, you made a bunch of changes, but tell us a little bit about WestJet itself, and then let’s get in to start talking about some of the changes as well.

Bill: Yeah, sure, Bill.

Steve: So I’ll give just a quick synopsis.

Steve: So WestJet is Canada’s second largest airline.

Steve: We compete against Air Canada, who is the largest carrier, and then two other carriers, one’s called Porter and one’s called Flair.

Steve: Each of us have somewhat of a unique position in the market.

Steve: I’d say for WestJet, the things we focus on are we’re more of a leisure-based carrier.

Steve: So where we fly, where our network goes, we fly to a lot of very nice leisure destinations.

Steve: We have, I’d say more skewed towards leisure, but we still have the business traffic, like let’s say Calgary, Toronto, Vancouver.

Steve: We do a lot of East-West Transcon.

Steve: We do a lot of into the US market.

Steve: But we’d say we’re in the West because we’re WestJet, and we’re more leisure than let’s say a business-centric carrier, and we’re lower cost.

Steve: So we’re a hybrid low-cost carrier.

Bill: Okay.

Bill: Before we get too much further, let me ask you something that is a favorite of ours at Let’s Talk Loyalty, and it’s a favorite of Paula Thomas’s, but she loves to ask all of our guests what their favorite nonfiction book is.

Bill: I don’t know if you have one, or maybe you don’t read nonfiction.

Bill: That could be an issue.

Steve: The problem is, yeah, this might make me sound super boring, but I don’t tend to read a lot of nonfiction, but I do read quite a bit of, sorry, I don’t read a lot of fiction, but I read more nonfiction books.

Steve: And so, yeah, but if I had to pick the ones that I’ve read recently, I tend to do biographies and I read a lot of elite athlete biographies, just I like to understand the headspace of elite athletes and their stories.

Steve: One I’ve read recently that I really like is Moneyball.

Steve: I think everyone knows the story.

Steve: It’s an amazing story about taking a different approach to an industry that hadn’t really discovered that yet and the impact of how they use data to transform baseball.

Steve: I think that was really fascinating.

Steve: And then I also get stuck in some Cold War espionage type stuff.

Bill: Okay.

Steve: Yeah, Bill Browder and like Red Notice and then some other stuff that it’s a little bit like fiction, but it is actually nonfiction.

Bill: That’s great.

Bill: That will get your wheels spinning, huh?

Steve: Yeah.

Bill: All right.

Bill: Here, I got to ask you this question.

Bill: Are you a Kindle reader or a paper book reader?

Steve: It’s just on my phone, just in the app.

Bill: On the phone.

Steve: Yeah, that’s it.

Steve: Audio books when I’m driving, audio books or podcasts when I’m driving.

Steve: And then I’ll just read the book on my phone if I’m traveling.

Bill: That’s great.

Bill: Okay.

Bill: Good.

Bill: Reading is a great thing to do, right?

Bill: Keeps your mind fresh.

Bill: So these changes that we were talking about with WestJet.

Bill: March 2025, you made the announcements and they were, I would say, pretty significant.

Bill: It was really interesting news.

Bill: So in the interest of time, because I know there’s just a very long list of changes you made and some really interesting things.

Bill: But to me, there was two or three, and I’m sure you’re way ahead of me.

Bill: Two or three really key changes, pivots that you made.

Bill: So can you talk about those?

Steve: For sure.

Steve: So there’s really five big changes.

Steve: Five big themes of change, I would say.

Steve: So the first one is that we change from a dollars-based currency to a points-based currency.

Steve: So we used to have one WestJet dollar got you one Canadian dollar and you can redeem it for really only a selective amount of things, but it was always a fixed value.

Steve: We changed that to be one dollar, we convert from one WestJet dollar equals 100 WestJet points, and then everyone’s accounts will be reflective of points on April 30th when we launch.

Steve: That’s the first big change.

Steve: Then the second big change is that we’re offering earn, earning on points in a much broader set of products within the WestJet ecosystem.

Steve: Today, you can only really earn points on base fare and vacation packages.

Steve: In the future, you’ll be able to earn for base fare, seats, bags, upgrades, and all the other stuff that surcharges.

Steve: The only thing you can’t really earn on is going to be government taxes and fees.

Steve: That’s the second change.

Steve: We should have a lot more points issuance in the system.

Steve: In that, we doubled the earn rate on our lowest base tier, and it’ll actually be more than a double of the earn rate because you’ll double the base earn rate and then you’ll be able to earn on all the other stuff.

Steve: We wanted to have a lot more points issuance in circulation for our everyday members and also top tier members.

Steve: They’re going to get more points in their accounts because they buy more flights and they buy more extras, so they’ll get a lot more points.

Steve: That’s the second change.

Steve: The third change is that you’ll be able to redeem on a lot more stuff, and so everything that you can now earn on, you can now redeem on.

Steve: That’s the same things like if you want to redeem for a better seat, you can do that.

Steve: You want to redeem for an upgrade, like a cabin upgrade, you can do that.

Steve: If you want to redeem, or let’s say if you’re a non-tier member and you don’t have a Corbin credit card, and you want to carry a bag or do a check in a bag, you can redeem for those too.

Steve: We’ve really opened up the amount of things that you can redeem on to as many things as we could at the start and more down the road.

Steve: One really interesting thing about this new redemption is that you can also now redeem for government taxes and fees.

Steve: So let’s say for the high company member, yeah, it’s great because I think in one of my previous podcasts with Paula, she’s like, what’s your favorite loyalty program?

Steve: And I answered at that point, it was the Marriott program.

Steve: Because one of the really cool things about the Marriott program is that when you redeem your points for a hotel night, you don’t actually have to pay anything extra.

Steve: And there’s a really nice little moment of joy when you’re doing that, that you’re like, I’m actually getting something for free.

Steve: Really.

Steve: And so we wanted that same thing to happen.

Steve: The challenge is that in the airline industry is that there’s all these other fees that the government puts on, especially in Canada, that we can’t just simply, like you have to have the points to redeem those.

Steve: But you still can get a truly free flight, redemption flight.

Steve: We have unrestricted inventory, you can get cashless points all over the place.

Steve: So that’s really the third one.

Steve: Then the fourth one is that you can reach the highest tier status in our program by spending on your credit card.

Steve: So let’s say, because we’re a leisure carrier, we have a lot of what we call premium leisure members in our program, who are, let’s say, quite affluent, and they can spend a lot on their credit card.

Steve: But they don’t fly as many times as a frequent flyer, like as a road warrior.

Steve: But they’re still very valuable to the airline.

Steve: We want to make sure that they feel the love that we can provide, and they deserve to be recognized for their value.

Steve: So we have that, and you can spend all the way up to platinum.

Steve: The fifth one, fifth and final category, is that we wanted our members to be able to engage with the program on an everyday basis.

Steve: So we signed two new partnerships with really prominent brands in Canada.

Steve: One of them is called Skip the Dishes.

Steve: It’s a food delivery company.

Steve: Chalice, which is a telecommunications company, one of the big two, big three telecommunications companies here in Canada.

Steve: Then we are launching an e-store within WestJet.

Steve: So you can earn points for online shopping and then take those points and redeem them for flights.

Steve: So those big five changes, they all fit into this nice redemption ecosystem, which is we have a non-restricted redemption ecosystem, where you can redeem any seat you can find on our website, and you can redeem for as little as 2,500 points.

Steve: So if you want to just save $25 on your flight, that’s all you have, fine, you can do that, or you can redeem all the way for the entire fare.

Steve: So we wanted to make at the end of the day, when we sat down, we designed the program, we wanted to make, give our members as many opportunities to earn and as many opportunities to burn as we possibly could and make those two things as easy as possible.

Steve: So really trying to keep the program simple and make it, just keep it simple and give our members the tools to save on their flights and vacations.

Bill: Right, right.

Bill: So for me, listening to that, I was thinking refreshment, WestJet did a big refreshment.

Bill: I think this is called step change or something much bigger than that because you covered things on the earn side, on the redemption side, you added partnerships, you gave flexibility.

Bill: So there’s a lot there and we can maybe get, I have a couple of other questions about just what it means to go to a dollars, to a points currency from dollars.

Bill: But how did you manage the communication effort, like just messaging all of that change to consumers or flyers?

Bill: What did you do there that was special?

Steve: So I think the main thing we did to try to be as successful as possible within that one step is work with a lot of members before the program launch, really, to do a lot of focus groups and do, like we worked directly with a Platinum and Gold member advisory panel and we would do them under NDA and we would review the program with them.

Steve: And we even did this one focus group where we had, let’s say everyone into the boardroom, we had one side of the table was one group of members and the other side of the table was another group of members.

Steve: And we had them read two different versions of the announcement letter.

Steve: The facilitator we have, part of our team, I was asking the participants what they liked about which letter.

Steve: And then so we could get a real time read on the different versions of the same announcement letter.

Steve: And that was really valuable to understand how people were interpreting information real time.

Steve: And that really shaped how we came out with the communications that we did.

Steve: Because it’s a lot of information for members to consume at the same time.

Steve: And we were making sure we get it right, yeah.

Bill: Yeah.

Bill: When you compose a focus group like that, did you select people from different tiers of the membership as it was?

Bill: Did you try to get representation across all different groups?

Steve: We did.

Bill: We did.

Steve: And focus groups are great for qualitative and insightful feedback.

Steve: They’re not great from a sampling point of view.

Steve: So we had to try to get as representative as we could with a group of, well, we had several groups of 20 people.

Steve: So we were able to get, let’s say, a reasonable read across different segments.

Steve: So we would have geographical representation.

Steve: We had different tiers.

Steve: We had men and women who are different tiers because how they are going to look at the program is going to be different.

Steve: We had different point accumulation velocities, different production pattern histories.

Steve: So we tried to get as much of a diverse set of perspectives as possible, even though all of those members are going to receiving a similar set of communications.

Bill: Right.

Bill: Interesting.

Bill: So when you think about the scope of what you’ve done, I think it’s obvious to say that you had to get the support from executive leadership.

Bill: This had to go to the highest levels of your business.

Bill: And so people were looking at it.

Bill: And I mean, you tell me, but it seems like WestJet put significant value on the table because you not only accelerated earnings overall, but then you’re awarding for more components of that fair structure and different other ancillary charges and things.

Bill: But so how would you describe what this signifies for WestJet, like your point of view on the whole thing, because you’re doing something much better for flyers, but you’re also putting a risk on the table.

Steve: Yeah, it’s a great question, Bill.

Steve: I think, to sum it up, I think it signifies the commitment WestJet has to the loyalty, the role that loyalty plays for members and for consumers in Canada, and how important a great loyalty program can be to help the performance of the airline.

Steve: And I think everyone who runs an airline loyalty program knows that the loyalty program, the members of the loyalty program drive a lot of value for the airline.

Steve: And we also know that other airline programs in Canada and around the world have really invested.

Steve: Over the course of the last 10 to 15 years, lots of new programs coming up, and I think members expect more.

Steve: Both had to invest to make sure that our members saw the commitment we’re making to the program.

Steve: And gave them more options, like give them more ways.

Steve: We said we want this program to work harder for our members.

Steve: It has to do more jobs so that our members will want to do more business with us.

Steve: So that’s kind of how we thought about it.

Bill: Okay, yeah.

Bill: It’s interesting to me, and you’ve been in the business a long time, so I’m sure you’ve felt this, but the trade, let’s call it loyalty marketing, it can be devalued by outsiders that don’t understand how complex it can be.

Bill: And so we always talk about the more thoughtful the framework, the better the result, the more sustainable the program.

Bill: And so I’m wondering, here you make this shift from, to points from dollars, how do you do that and ensure that you’re going to remain flexible into the future, that you can have a healthy program into the future, that it just survives well over time?

Steve: Yeah, that’s great.

Steve: That’s a great question.

Steve: So, I think that a lot of the work, I mean, the audience of this podcast will understand that when we, they’ll know that these things take a lot of time.

Steve: I’ve been with WestJet for two and a half years now, I think almost exactly two and a half years.

Steve: And I started working on it the first day that I joined.

Bill: Oh, okay.

Steve: We were right from the start, we were working on, I knew we were going to work on a loyalty transformation.

Steve: And as soon as I got here, we started.

Steve: And exactly, it’s two and almost two and a half years later to the day that we were able to announce the new program.

Steve: We had to go through a very long, you do a very long design phase and you do iterative economics modeling to understand where all of the economics are going to flow.

Steve: And you look at all your segments to see who’s impacted and how much is impacted and where does it come from and what’s the driver of the economic value.

Steve: Like all those things get done and you have to counterbalance all of that work against what we felt was a set of principles of the program design had to be simple, had to be accessible, had to be valuable.

Steve: And so we always were looking at our program design iterations against our framework or like our principles based framework and some other principles that we had.

Steve: But like really trying to do the design then test them against that and then you go through another round of review and then you make some changes and then you go do that all over again and you know you have tens of tens or twenty you know ten, twenty, thirty different design iterations easily before you actually come up with one that you can do.

Bill: Okay, it’s so interesting you say that that’s the reality of the work.

Bill: In our Loyalty Academy courseware, we have at some point a case study that we do and it’s just making me think of the statement that we included there.

Bill: We say, you know, remember you’re doing this for one year and you’re just doing this as a case.

Bill: If this was reality, you would be going through multiple iterations.

Bill: You’d have a lot of different people to talk to and they’d all have a different viewpoint.

Bill: That’s what you just lived through for a couple of years.

Steve: Yeah, I think we didn’t make this in the, like you wouldn’t put this in the press release, but we also replaced our Loyalty Core Platform at the same time.

Bill: Oh, okay.

Bill: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Steve: Yeah, so it was a complete rip out and replace the entire ecosystem of how Loyalty works within WestJet.

Steve: So all the, every, all the part we did take out our old system, put it into a new system, redo all the architecture, do all the integrations, do all the, the branding is different.

Bill: Oh, my gosh.

Steve: Yeah.

Bill: Yeah.

Bill: It was a, it was a big lift.

Bill: Absolutely.

Steve: Yeah.

Bill: What are the kind of things that you do look at, like for you, just are there any sort of bellwethers or just things that you track to make sure that the program is going in the direction that you want, hitting targets?

Steve: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah, for sure.

Steve: It’s, I think the one thing that’s really wonderful about loyalty and, and in particular, airline loyalty, is that the amount of data that you get on the business is really incredible.

Steve: And I kind of liken it to the telemetry that would come off a Formula One car.

Steve: There’s just so many different data streams that you’re looking at all the time.

Steve: If you can come to mind, you know, we basically would have, we would look at all of our members and look at how they’re performing with the airline.

Steve: So you look at, let’s say, yields.

Steve: You always look at the yields and the fares and the tier population in and out, the value to your members, the lifetime value of the members themselves.

Steve: So you look at, let’s say, the airline perspective, the program’s impact on the airline, and then you also look at the program as its own stand-alone economic entity, like the points issuance, the billings that are coming in, the redemption, the redemption margin, the breakage, and all activity segments.

Steve: So you kind of look at it through two lenses, like at least two, towards the airline.

Steve: And then the other one is from the program’s perspective.

Bill: Okay.

Bill: Okay.

Bill: Yeah, that’s really good.

Bill: That’s great.

Bill: Let’s talk about partnerships for a minute, because you mentioned something very interesting about adding some everyday context to the business.

Bill: And we know that partnerships are a great way to add value to a co-program, right?

Bill: You can leverage.

Bill: Tell me again what you added and maybe talk about the direction you might be headed for anything in the future.

Steve: Yeah, we added two partners right off the bat.

Steve: So we added an everyday, well, it’s called Skip the Dishes, which is a food delivery, started as a food delivery company.

Steve: And so you kind of like Uber Eats and DoorDash.

Steve: And they’ve expanded into, you know, you can pick up convenience to write it.

Steve: But essentially, it’s a food and home goods delivery business.

Steve: And and I personally use it quite often.

Steve: I’m sure a lot of the listeners, if they’re in Canada, use them often as well.

Steve: And Uber Eats is quite familiar and ubiquitous and kind of everyday consumer life these days.

Steve: So that’s really good everyday partnership.

Steve: And then at the same time, we launched a partnership with TELUS to tell communications.

Steve: So you’ll be able to earn points on your cell phone bill.

Steve: So they have cell phone, TV, internet, home security, a number of other business lines.

Steve: And so they’re like, if you’re a TELUS customer, you can earn a lot of points when we announce the actual value prop.

Steve: We haven’t announced it yet.

Steve: But when we get there, you’ll be able to earn on a lot of stuff.

Steve: And also we’re going to allow for redemption on that as well.

Steve: So you can redeem for your stuff on your TELUS bill as well.

Steve: Kind of get back to one of your earlier questions about, what was the philosophy of the program?

Steve: Was we wanted to offer our members the ability to save on stuff.

Steve: You know, save on flights and vacations primarily.

Steve: But if members want the program to work harder for them and save in another way, we want to do that with our everyday partners and just allow them to use the program as they wish in that regard.

Bill: Okay.

Bill: Okay.

Bill: Yeah, that’s great.

Bill: It’s really good.

Bill: So let’s get strategic for a minute.

Bill: I don’t know if it’s a bit philosophical, but I was talking to a CEO recently who told me that he thought that customers are really more loyal to experiences than they are brands and certainly more to both of those than a program.

Bill: I’m just wondering, the importance of CX, it’s one of those topics that we bounce around all the time in this business.

Bill: But how did this loyalty, we’ll call it a refresh for now, the big change of all the announcements, how is it reflected in CX?

Bill: Was there a dovetailing between the two that maybe it’s going to be noticeable by travelers?

Steve: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of interconnectedness between how the program operates, how members experience the program.

Steve: If you think about the program has a bunch of features, and a feature ABC, and you think about how members use those features.

Steve: That’s the experience part, then you get the product part, and then between the two of those things, they make up the overall brand experience.

Steve: That’s highly simplifying it, but if we use that simplified framework, then we put a lot of work into how do we want our members to use this program and where are the points of failure in our current program, that were leading to some experiences that weren’t as positive.

Steve: If I take two different types of the experience, so the first one is a bit of the product disappointment factor of when I redeem a bunch of WestJet dollars and I still have to fork out $500 for my trip to Mexico for tax and fees, that’s an experience that doesn’t provide a lot of positive.

Steve: It’s positive, not the maximum amount of joy that someone can feel when they redeemed for that trip.

Steve: The product changes themselves are allowing for some experience differences in how members use it, and then I think the second one is everything in this industry is essentially virtual.

Steve: There’s really, other than the top tier welcome kit we give, there’s nothing really tangible that we actually deploy, and so everyone’s grand impression is delivered through these experiences, and we wanted the web and app experience to take another step forward.

Steve: So we invested a lot of time and money into making those things work better.

Steve: So between the program redesign and the way that we deliver the program to the members, we wanted that overall experience to take a big step forward on all those different fronts.

Bill: You know what, I couldn’t imagine a better example, a more poignant example than that, you know, because it’s, I completely understand from a consumer standpoint, the thrill almost of just redeem and you redeem, you get what you’re redeemed for, and you don’t have to reach into your wallet, pull out a card, do anything.

Steve: Exactly.

Steve: There’s like, it’s exactly, I mean, I think I had this feeling, I was like, come back to the Marriott example, and I remember how happy I felt when I was redeeming for a vacation for my family or a five-night set, and so I was working somewhere and I didn’t have to shell out a dime, and how awesome that was, and we didn’t think that would happen in our program because that’s a different feeling.

Steve: That’s brilliant.

Steve: Yeah.

Bill: Well done.

Steve: I can just add one more.

Steve: I just thought about on that last one.

Steve: There’s one thing that’s really unique about aspirational loyalty programs like airline loyalty programs and hotels, and some of these ones that are more, let’s say, vacation-oriented is that people work, members work, they kind of have this mission, right?

Steve: They work over quite a long time frame by earning points in small increments, and then redeeming them in a big increment, typically speaking, to get something big and joyful.

Steve: And so that experience of that sort of long-term increment experience of earning all those points, we also wanted to make that as joyful as possible, because I think that’s an undervalued component of the overall brand experience, if you will, in the loyalty program.

Steve: So giving these everyday partnerships allow for that, allow for members giving them more tools.

Steve: And then we were also working on how do we make sure we reinforce that positivity through the member communications along the way.

Steve: We have work to do, but that’s something we were thinking about.

Bill: Gosh, that’s something.

Bill: Yeah.

Bill: And I know, by the way, I didn’t mention this at the outset, but this was wave two of three, if I remember from the WordPress release.

Bill: So there’s more to come even.

Steve: Yeah, there’s more to come.

Steve: There’s the first one was that we made some top tier changes in November, that those were tougher for our members, admittedly.

Steve: Like that was a set of, we knew we had to go through, let’s say a period of, let’s say more negative changes before we could get to the really good stuff, which we had to go through.

Steve: And then we came out with the recent announcements.

Steve: And then the third phase is more the launch of these everyday partnerships.

Steve: And then we have our on-board Wi-Fi with TELUS.

Steve: As part of our TELUS partnership, that would be fast and free Wi-Fi in every seat on the aircraft plane.

Bill: That’s big.

Steve: It’s really big.

Steve: I think that will make the, like talking to your point about experiences, it will make the experience of flying a lot, you know, a lot more tolerable, I guess you could say.

Steve: It’s not easy to fly these days.

Steve: And if you get delayed, being able to stay connected is always helpful.

Steve: And if you can have free streaming quality Wi-Fi, then, you know, just keep watching your Netflix and, you know, you’ll get there.

Bill: Absolutely.

Bill: You know, there’s something in that change, I think, that’s very similar to having a redemption that’s just clean and easy.

Bill: And it’s that, that for a long time, I think people have probably gotten on an airplane and said, oh gosh, I either forgot to buy the Wi-Fi ahead of time or now I have, I’m going to do it now.

Bill: And so I have to dig through my wallet or whatever you do.

Bill: But I think that’s more than a service.

Bill: It’s probably a really satisfying convenience for a lot of travelers.

Bill: I wonder if you’ve gotten, have you gotten really good feedback on that one?

Steve: We’ve gotten good feedback on the announcement.

Steve: It hasn’t gone into service yet.

Steve: So we’re waiting for it to go into service.

Steve: But when I talk to people about it, I say, here, imagine walking onto an airplane, connecting to the Wi-Fi network, and then immediately streaming for free from there until the time you land.

Steve: That sounds really cool.

Bill: So I think we’ll get a good response.

Bill: Yeah, absolutely.

Bill: So I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you.

Bill: I have two more questions for you.

Bill: One of them is one of these ones that we like to ask.

Bill: I probably had a question about the book.

Bill: But before I do that, I have to ask you about AI because in every conversation we’re having, it seems like people want to know, well, is AI is central to your strategy or is it peripheral?

Bill: Is it something that you’re studying?

Bill: But what’s the role or how are you looking at it today?

Bill: Is it something that you’re studying or is there anything that you’re doing right now that you could talk about if you can talk about it?

Steve: I would say that I think that there are so many fields out there that AI is going to have an impact on and a very sizable impact.

Steve: I think in the world of the consumer marketing environment, I think AI will have a really large impact on loyalty.

Steve: It’s actually really right for loyalty programs because the amount of data that we have about our members and the faster that you can crunch through that data and find opportunities, and the faster you can analyze that data and understand that data better, the better program you can operate down the road.

Steve: Think of personalized marketing engines, think about redemption optimization engines, think about segmentations, that schema that you didn’t know you had before.

Steve: There are so many things in the AI world that will hit home with loyalty, that it’s on our horizons, inevitable part of our future strategy.

Steve: I’d say most of our time and energy recently has been spent on these program changes.

Steve: Sure, sure, sure.

Steve: We’re not very far down the road right now, but we’ll get there.

Bill: Yeah.

Bill: I’ve got to imagine so, flight operations would be one of those places too, that I’m sure they’re looking at it because there are just so many variables there to try to keep an on-time schedule.

Bill: Yeah, absolutely.

Bill: This has been good and I really appreciate your time.

Bill: I’ve got a question for you though.

Bill: It’s just because I know you’ve been in this business a while in a good way.

Bill: I was wondering if you ever had an epiphany moment along the way.

Bill: So maybe you’re in the business for a while, you’re learning, you’re trying to prove it to yourself and others.

Bill: But was there ever a moment where you observed something with a brand or otherwise that made you think like, this really works?

Bill: I think it might work.

Steve: Yeah, there’s been many, I would say.

Steve: One of the things I love about loyalty is that anyone who’s really curious, it’s a great spot for people to be who have the drive to just learn more, just keep learning, keep learning more and it’s a wonderful learning environment because of how much data that comes in and the programs just change, and all sorts of these things that you get, sort of like an ex-management consultant’s dream, which is coming on.

Steve: But I think one epiphany moment in particular would be just the power that a loyalty program can have on how much people are willing to do to be a part of a program.

Steve: So take out, let’s say, the highest tier, it’s like the mileage run epiphany, and being in it myself and doing a mileage run on my own, because as a loyalty professional, and doing a mileage run on my own, the amount of influence that it had over me is like, these things really work, and if you do it right, then you can have a really good impact on your organization.

Steve: Also at the same time, the things that we’re doing with our members, and the things that we’re enabling, like we are happy when our members redeem for a free flight and vacation.

Steve: We want them to do those.

Bill: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve: Seeing someone redeem and getting a free flight and taking their saving for that vacation, that’s a really cool part of being in this type of business to me, and so I love seeing those things.

Steve: It’s part of the epiphany moments that have occurred many times over my career, but just the thing of how much dedication someone will put into a program and earning their way to either status or free vacation.

Bill: That’s really good.

Bill: Okay.

Bill: That’s a good way to land it, which is, I guess I’m a fan of puns, so I had to work that in somehow.

Bill: Some double or just double on Chandra.

Bill: Maybe that’s not even a pun.

Steve: That’s great.

Bill: Yeah.

Bill: The Wiser Loyalty podcast series, we’re really proud to be doing this in collaboration with Let’s Talk Loyalty from The Wise Marketer, and to have you Steve McClelland on the podcast today is great.

Bill: Vice President of Loyalty at WestJet.

Bill: All these announcements are pretty stunning, and I can’t wait to just connect with you maybe a few months down the road, and get to hear a little bit of readout on results and impressions, and plus you’ve got wave three of announcements coming out.

Bill: So a lot there.

Bill: But thank you so much.

Bill: I appreciate your time.

Bill: I really thank you for joining us here today.

Steve: Thank you, Bill.

Steve: Thanks for having me on.

Steve: I appreciate it.

Bill: You bet.

Bill: All right.

Bill: Thanks, everyone.

Paula: This show is sponsored by Wise Marketer Group, publisher of The Wise Marketer, the premier digital customer loyalty marketing resource for industry relevant news, insights and research.

Paula: Wise Marketer Group also offers loyalty education and training globally through its Loyalty Academy, which has certified nearly 900 marketeers and executives in 49 countries as certified Loyalty Marketing Professionals.

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