Emirates Skywards: Why Bigger Isn’t Always Better in Loyalty Partnerships (#811)

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: If you work in loyalty marketing, join us every week to hear the latest ideas and insights for loyalty marketing specialists around the world.

Lisa: Today’s guest leads partnerships for one of the world’s biggest airline loyalty programs, a role that sits at the crossroads of commercial strategy, activations and member experience.

Lisa: She has spent eight years building out the partnerships ecosystem, driving value for members and airline alike.

Lisa: We’ll get into how the function is structured, including a deliberate move away from chasing scale towards quality and relevance, and what it actually takes to build a team capable of managing over 70 non-air partners.

Lisa: Please welcome Nancy Clark, Vice President, Loyalty Partnerships at Skywards.

Lisa: Welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV.

Lisa: It’s so great to have you with us.

Nancy: Thank you, Lisa.

Nancy: It’s fantastic to be here with you.

Lisa: Amazing.

Lisa: So we’ll start how we always start every show, is if you could tell us a book that potentially has a non-fiction book that has inspired your life, your partnerships, leadership style or business.

Nancy: So there’s a book called Multipliers by Liz Wiseman.

Lisa: Okay.

Nancy: And it really changed the way I lead.

Nancy: And the premise is that leaders can either amplify the capability of people or limit it, diminish it.

Nancy: And there was one idea that really resonated with me, and that was of accidental diminishes.

Nancy: And that is when a leader with all good intentions, thinking that they’re doing the right things for their team, is actually limiting their growth.

Nancy: So I discovered that I was either a rescuer at times or a protector.

Nancy: And I realized that that was not actually helpful for the growth of the individuals within my team.

Nancy: So I’ve learned to catch it, watch it, and not do it as much as possible.

Lisa: Oh, that’s so interesting.

Lisa: I think it’s making me think now, because I think when you become in leadership, you don’t really know what kind of leader you are until you get into it.

Lisa: And then also retrospectively, you can look back and think in your career, I certainly can, and go, that wasn’t great, or now I’ve learned and that’s where I’ve evolved to.

Lisa: And actually, yeah, it’s really interesting.

Lisa: So the two types that you said that you were, but you shouldn’t be, what were they again?

Nancy: Rescuer and protector.

Paula: So that’s very motherly.

Paula: Very motherly.

Nancy: It’s very motherly.

Nancy: You know, and it’s really sort of wanting to protect your team.

Paula: Yeah, I feel like I probably still do that.

Paula: You do that.

Nancy: And it’s, you know, as the leader, you feel you must be there to overcome those barriers and those obstacles for them and to help to sort of sort out problems for them.

Nancy: And it can be sort of at all levels, but actually it’s not the best thing to do because obviously they don’t grow.

Nancy: And that’s what we also encourage our children.

Nancy: I don’t want to, you know, draw parallels between our team and children.

Nancy: But, you know, as a leader, we do have that sort of sense of responsibility to look after our team, but it’s very good to be aware of it.

Nancy: And I really liked that book for that reason.

Lisa: It’s like finding the right balance between that, making sure that there is some degree of protectiveness, but also making sure that they have that space to grow.

Lisa: Exactly.

Lisa: Yeah, I read something once about females in business and actually how we are great leaders because we have empathy.

Lisa: And it’s something that men, not all men, I don’t want to generalize, but don’t have that as naturally as women.

Lisa: And so, yeah, combining empathy with, you know, also not smothering or being too protective, finding that right balance.

Lisa: No, great.

Lisa: Sounds like a great book.

Lisa: It is.

Lisa: Absolutely.

Lisa: I will definitely look it up.

Lisa: I find that every time we do these podcasts, I always I need to add that book to my list.

Lisa: I need to add that book to my list.

Lisa: But tell us, Nancy, please talk us through your career path.

Lisa: How did you end up being vice president of loyalty partnerships at Skywards?

Nancy: So, I actually started on the airlines brand and comm side.

Nancy: And when the role came up with Skywards partnerships, it brought together everything I love, which is commercial brand and people.

Nancy: So for five years, I was working in our corporate communications, marketing and brand team.

Nancy: And I was effectively doing a mini CMO role across our European markets and then our America’s markets.

Nancy: And it was leading sort of a 360 comm strategy across advertising, PR, social, sponsorship and events, as well as supporting our sales and commercial teams in those markets to kind of help us fill the planes.

Nancy: So when the role came up as head of partnerships at Skywards, it really appealed to me because of the strong commercial focus.

Nancy: We actually sit in the commercial department at Emirates Skywards does.

Nancy: As well as loyalty, which was a new discipline for me, but one that I was very interested to learn about.

Nancy: And then with marketing underpinning it all.

Nancy: So that’s kind of where I got to.

Nancy: It has been now 13 years with the Emirates Group in total.

Lisa: That’s a good tenure.

Nancy: Yes.

Lisa: And how has the partnership function changed?

Lisa: Because I think when I spoke to you before, you said you’ve been in that role eight years.

Lisa: And so how has that changed from then until now?

Lisa: And what does partnerships cover in the department?

Nancy: So we are now a team of 40.

Lisa: Wow.

Nancy: And we have five verticals.

Nancy: Eight years ago, we were a team of eight people and two verticals.

Nancy: So in terms of the size of the team, a growth of five X.

Nancy: But look, in 2018, we were really accelerating the shift within Skywards of a frequent flyer program to lifestyle loyalty.

Nancy: And we were on a mission to democratize loyalty to our then 20 million members worldwide.

Nancy: And I remember over a three year period that we bought on 30 direct partners across travel and financial and lifestyle categories.

Nancy: And the strategy that we had then was earn more, travel better.

Nancy: So it was giving our members the opportunity to earn more, to build their miles balance in their everyday lives, and then to use those miles for rewarding aspirational experiences with Emirates or with our hotel partners or our airline partners.

Nancy: And I would say that today, that strategy is still valid, but we’re focusing more now on rewarding members at every moment of their lives, looking for a choice of earn and redemption partners that will bring meaning and relevance to them, and really to encourage that flywheel of loyalty.

Lisa: And so when we talk about partnerships, how do you structure the different types of partners?

Lisa: How is that construct put together?

Lisa: You’ve talked about so many, you’ve grown drastically from eight years to now in terms of team and partner size.

Lisa: How do you structure the depth of that internally?

Nancy: So we have 70, let’s say, direct partner integration sitting under me.

Nancy: I don’t actually look after airline partners.

Nancy: That sits with another colleague of mine.

Nancy: But we have 70 partnerships that give our members access to thousands of brands worldwide.

Nancy: And we are structured across five verticals.

Nancy: So I have Travel and Lifestyle Partnerships.

Nancy: Then there is Global Financial Partnerships, UAE and GCC co-brand partnerships.

Nancy: Then we have our Skywards Activations team.

Nancy: And they work with our communications and brand team to really bring the story of Skywards to life and to promote our products and partnerships to our members.

Nancy: And then we have a Partnerships Planning and Operations team.

Nancy: And so the Activations and Operations team work cross-functionally across the industry partnerships verticals.

Lisa: And so that’s a lot of partners, 70 or so now with the program.

Lisa: And so your philosophy of acquisition of partners, is that more is better or how is the growth of that in terms of how do you look at that?

Nancy: So before COVID, I can’t believe I’m using this phrase before COVID, but it was quite a, it just happened to be quite a sort of a significant milestone, I suppose, in some of the transition that we made within the ecosystem and across the strategy.

Nancy: But before COVID, we were very much building scale and choice.

Nancy: And now we are looking more for those who perhaps earn a place within the ecosystem.

Nancy: So we were looking for, and at the time sort of from 2018 when I started, and it had started just before that, we were bringing on global hotel and travel brands, as well as marquee brands in our strategic markets.

Nancy: So for us, our strategic markets would be the US, UK, UAE.

Nancy: And we were also working with loyalty tech partners, who would support us to bring on multiple partners across the world through a single integration.

Nancy: So it made it a lot easier for us.

Nancy: And we were also working with partners who could white label some of our solutions that we wanted to bring to life.

Nancy: So a couple of examples of those are Skywards Miles Mall, where our members have access to thousands of retail brands where they can earn and spend their miles.

Nancy: And Emirates Skywards Hotels, we have around 400,000 properties there.

Nancy: Again, which is an earn and redemption platform.

Nancy: So at that time, it was very much scale and choice.

Nancy: And now that we’ve got that foundation, I’m looking more to see where we’ve got gaps in our ecosystem.

Nancy: It may be reaching kind of the younger audiences.

Nancy: We all talk about Gen Z and what is it that they’re looking for.

Nancy: I’m also looking for partners who have a strong marketing reach, who really have data and personalization at their heart, and have strong loyalty experience, because that makes it a lot easier to work with them.

Nancy: But partnerships is a business.

Nancy: It is a business on its own.

Nancy: But we are primarily there to bring loyalty to the airline and to drive member engagement.

Nancy: So we’re always looking for partners who can meet those strategic objectives with us.

Lisa: And based on the scale that Emirates has achieved and Skywards has achieved, I can imagine, and I hear it all the time, because people always say to me, can you introduce me to Emirates?

Lisa: You must get so many people coming and saying, can we partner with Emirates?

Lisa: And always Skywards.

Lisa: How do you say, what qualifies a yes?

Lisa: And how do you also say no?

Lisa: Because you must have to reject a lot of people, I would imagine.

Nancy: Yes, we are very lucky that we get opportunities on an almost daily basis.

Nancy: And the question that we always have to ask ourselves is, does that align with our members’ interests?

Nancy: And does it meet our KPIs?

Nancy: Because yes, a lot of these opportunities, they would bring choice, color, flavor to the ecosystem.

Nancy: But it’s becoming, as you know, Lisa, more and more, how do I put it, difficult to do business in the super compliant world.

Nancy: So to bring a partnership to life requires lengthy legal tech, cyber security, data privacy on both sides, for both parties usually.

Nancy: It takes a long time.

Nancy: So you really have to prioritize what comes into that ecosystem.

Nancy: We have a very, very robust prioritization process within Skywards, where we assess not only partnerships, but also products, program enhancements and features, and we also support the wider enterprise initiatives across the group.

Nancy: I think we’ve got about 400 initiatives on the go at the moment in Skywards alone.

Nancy: And some of those have been prioritized for the next two quarters, but there are a lot sitting in our backlog.

Nancy: So there’s always so much to keep us busy.

Nancy: So I think it’s more difficult, I should say it’s more difficult to say yes to partners who perhaps only cater to one smaller market outside of our strategic markets because we don’t see the scale.

Nancy: Or it may be that they don’t have a significant brand content that we’re looking for, or the loyalty tech or expertise as well.

Nancy: And you know, sometimes it can just come down to rapport, right?

Nancy: Because you can have, you can get into discussions.

Lisa: Yeah, fair enough, yeah.

Nancy: You can realize that actually your partnerships and your business interests don’t really align and perhaps your ways of working are different.

Nancy: And you realize that it’s going to be very difficult to build kind of a strong and lasting partnership based on that.

Nancy: So it’s sometimes better to walk away from the opportunity.

Lisa: Yeah, and fair enough, it’s all about relationship, isn’t it?

Lisa: And it also is two-way, it needs to be mutually beneficial.

Lisa: And if you can’t reach that goal, it makes it very difficult.

Nancy: It does.

Lisa: And so if I was to sit with you at the end of the month and you’re looking at your partnerships dashboard and the measurements that you use to look at whether the strategy is successful, what would you be looking at?

Nancy: So we have about 45 metrics that we look at in partnerships.

Nancy: But if I was looking at two measures that would show me whether the strategy was successful, it would be partner activity and member activity.

Nancy: So partner activity is really looking to see if the member is transacting, interacting with our partner ecosystem and whether that has grown month on month and year on year.

Nancy: Then we sort of go up to the next level where we look at program activity, member activity to see has one of our 40 million members, are they engaging with the program either through product, partnership or flight?

Nancy: And we measure that over a 12 month period.

Nancy: And then we also look at flight activity, which is very important, of course, where we look to see whether our members have taken a flight within the last 12 months.

Nancy: And, you know, partnerships absolutely has a role to play in that because when I look at, for example, our co-brand programs, so when we introduce a co-brand program into a market, we see that the program active metric will jump by between 5 and 10%.

Lisa: Wow, amazing.

Nancy: And we also see that in our UAE co-brand programs, and actually in the US as well, that our card holders are twice or three times more flight active than the members in their respective markets.

Nancy: So, you know, they are very effective at creating that member engagement and bringing that loyalty back to the airline.

Lisa: No, it’s fascinating.

Lisa: I would love to see these 45 metrics, because I could imagine it’s quite fascinating and the impact that the partnerships would have on making me fly.

Lisa: I think about my own relationship with Skywards and everything that I do outside of flying is trying to accumulate more miles, but I might not fly.

Lisa: And I know we were talking to Paula about that.

Lisa: I might not fly that often.

Lisa: These days with having kids, I’m not an active fly, but I’m much more active on the non-flight side.

Lisa: So it’s so important to have that spectrum of partners to keep me engaged to get me to fly than I think it ever was in the past.

Lisa: So I can imagine that you spent a lot of time looking at these data and metrics and evaluating.

Lisa: So there are effectively three parties in a partnership.

Lisa: There’s the member, there’s obviously Skywards and the partner.

Lisa: How do you go about making sure that each party within that triangle is getting the right value?

Nancy: So I actually think it’s quite simple.

Nancy: It sounds simple.

Nancy: But if you put the member first, and you get that right at the outset, then all parties win.

Nancy: So if you, as the partners, are looking at what is rewarding for the member?

Nancy: What problem is it solving in their life?

Nancy: Is it bringing a new experience?

Nancy: Is it going to be relevant and meaningful?

Nancy: And if you can do that, then you’ve got a great partnership.

Lisa: And can, is it possible for you to have a really commercially positive partner?

Lisa: So a partner brings a lot of commercial value to the program, but actually not that great for the member.

Lisa: And therefore you make a decision to no longer work with that partner, even if it’s commercially really good for you.

Lisa: How do you, how will you approach that?

Nancy: So, yeah, sometimes it can happen when a partnership is commercially successful, but not right for the program.

Nancy: So two things that we always protect are our elite tiers, and also our program from fraud and gaming.

Nancy: So our most valued members expect exclusivity.

Nancy: They expect a fantastic member experience, availability, accessibility, and we never want to dilute that.

Nancy: What we’re seeing more and more, and we’re not alone in Skywards, it’s happening to all large loyalty programs, is that there is fraud, there’s gaming, there’s account abuse, and it’s getting more and more sophisticated.

Nancy: And at Skywards, we actually have a team dedicated, a team of eight dedicated to protecting us from fraud and gaming.

Nancy: And they do a fantastic job.

Nancy: I think some of the best in the business, actually.

Nancy: But the reality is that the more commercially successful a partnership is, the more miles and tiers there are available in the market to game with.

Nancy: So we have to manage the supply of that carefully.

Nancy: And sometimes that means a trade-off with a successful partnership.

Lisa: Yeah, so interesting.

Lisa: And fraud these days, they’re getting very clever with how to game and earn more currency.

Lisa: Across the board at all programs, especially with AI, is becoming more and more of a challenge.

Lisa: And then so, do you have partners, and I say this because this has happened to me, but do you have partners where you signed them on and they were relevant at that moment, but then later down the line when you reevaluate, you just kind of feel like, well, that was relevant then and now it’s not.

Lisa: And how do you, and if you do, how do you go about that process of one, evaluating and two, kind of having that discussion?

Nancy: So it has happened, and it’s happened recently, where you start the partnership together with all the good intentions, where your interests are aligned from a business and partnership perspective, and whether there’s a change within their business, within your own, or maybe it’s a change in the market.

Nancy: And I think one of the signs where things aren’t going great is when you see member engagement drop.

Nancy: Perhaps if it’s in a co-brand program, you see the number of acquisitions go down.

Nancy: And at that point, it’s never a quick out.

Nancy: Let’s put it like that.

Nancy: Because as we spoke about earlier, it takes so long to bring a partnership to life and to build that partnership.

Nancy: So to end that partnership takes a lot of decision.

Nancy: You’ve got to weigh everything up and really decide whether it is the right for the business.

Nancy: But if after kind of rounds of discussions, and you might have made some adjustments perhaps to the custom value proposition, and that’s still not working, you kind of say, look, it’s probably best for both parties if we part ways.

Nancy: And usually by that point, you’re both in agreement.

Lisa: Both in agreement, yeah.

Nancy: It wouldn’t be a sort of a sudden shock if we turned round and said, hey, we, you know, bye now.

Nancy: We’ve been having those conversations.

Nancy: And so, you know, it’s just kind of run its natural course at times.

Lisa: Yeah.

Lisa: And a partnership is exactly what it is.

Lisa: It’s a partnership of two sides coming together.

Lisa: And I think, like you rightly say, you would know if it’s not working on both sides.

Lisa: And the objectives also change.

Lisa: I remember at a hotel company I was at, I was tasked with signing FFP partners.

Lisa: And I think I ended up signing 18.

Lisa: And it was because the brand needed to get itself out there.

Lisa: But the reality is we didn’t need 18 FFP partners.

Lisa: We had our own loyalty program as well.

Lisa: And so over time, it was like, okay, thank you to some of these airlines that nobody ever used.

Lisa: We ended up getting rid of it for obvious reasons.

Lisa: And so it’s always a good sign of a good partnership if both sides are engaging.

Lisa: And obviously it works for both sides.

Lisa: But okay, so Skywards is obviously started life as a frequent flyer program and has evolved now with this 70 partner network into non-flying partners, which is amazing.

Lisa: How do you think about the relationship between those two sides?

Lisa: We’ve already spoke about how they feed each other, but how will that change or how will that look like going forward?

Lisa: Is that going to continue having the lifestyle partner supporting the flying?

Lisa: Is there going to be a shift in how that looks?

Nancy: So Skywards exists really to create loyalty to the airline, and that will always be true.

Nancy: Partnerships create that loyalty between flights, so they both have a role to play.

Nancy: But our purpose at Skywards is really to encourage members to fly more and fly better.

Nancy: But the partnerships ecosystem, it allows our members to engage with the program when they’re not flying, and it also helps us to build an emotional connection with the brand in their everyday lives, because they’re not traveling every day.

Nancy: And so this is a way that we can create that and maintain that emotional connection when they’ve left the Emirates plane.

Nancy: It’s especially important in our, what we call our ultra long haul markets like the US, where our members there are probably maybe not flying more than once a year on an Emirates flight.

Nancy: So we need to be able to keep that conversation going.

Nancy: But partnerships really keep, what we see is that they really keep that flywheel of loyalty spinning, whilst also ensuring that we are bringing member engagement and loyalty back to the airline.

Lisa: Yeah, I feel like these days, in the past, it was all about the Frequent Flyer program, whereas now partnerships is an integral part of all FFP strategies.

Lisa: And I don’t think they can live with coexist without it.

Lisa: You said a very key word there every day, which leads me lovely on to the next question about Skywards Every Day.

Lisa: So you have the Skywards Every Day app.

Lisa: That was a conscious choice to have Skywards Every Day as a separate app?

Nancy: Yes.

Nancy: So Skywards Every Day is our homegrown app, and it was really built to make Skywards Miles the lifestyle currency of the UAE.

Lisa: Nice, nice.

Nancy: We’re still on that mission.

Nancy: We’re still on that journey, but we’re getting there.

Nancy: So we now have 570 partners who we directly partner with in the app across dining, grocery, shopping, fuel categories.

Nancy: And actually, when we talk about a relaunch, when we relaunch the product in 2023, we had 200 partners.

Nancy: So it’s been a huge growth just in the past few years.

Nancy: We currently have 50,000 monthly active users, and we are looking to get to 70,000 in the next couple of months.

Nancy: It’s really designed to allow our members to earn and redeem miles within the Skywards Everyday Partner ecosystem in their everyday lives.

Nancy: It’s powered by Loyalty Juggernaut, and we have a seamless card-linking solution that’s provided by Loyal Solutions.

Lisa: Should say that I’m involved in that, just so it’s clear.

Lisa: Yeah.

Nancy: But the beauty of that means that even for our international visitors who come into the UAE, they can link an international payment card, a Visa or MasterCard international card, and they can sort of tap and go and earn and burn just like everybody else can within the UAE.

Lisa: Without actually having a co-brand, which is perfect.

Nancy: It is.

Nancy: It’s accessible to everybody.

Lisa: And do you have a lot of international people out of interest downloading the app and linking their card?

Lisa: Or is that more of a growing kind of sector?

Nancy: We do.

Nancy: We see that more and more.

Nancy: I think for us, it is about creating more of a more awareness about our Skywards Every Day product in the UAE to our sort of strategic markets.

Nancy: But we are looking to scale the product and actually to bring it to our strategic markets like the UK and Australia.

Nancy: So then it will become even more relevant to those members in our international markets.

Lisa: And with, it’s great to have Skywards Every Day because then for me, it enables us as a user to go and scroll and see, okay, quickly, where can I earn my Skywards miles?

Lisa: But with so many partners, do you find it difficult to be able to communicate to your members or what partners are up to?

Lisa: Because you know what it’s like when you have a partner and they’re contacting you saying, please can you send this promotion to your members?

Lisa: Please can I have some space to communicate X, Y, Z?

Lisa: It’s always a, well, in the past, for me, it was always a challenge because you never had enough opportunities to get all of the partners.

Lisa: But with 70 partners, how do you manage that?

Nancy: Yeah, I mean, that is a challenge.

Nancy: I can see it being a challenge as we go forward, and especially as we build the number of partners.

Nancy: But with Skywards Every Day, actually one of the main reasons that we did decide to have it was because it allowed us to have a platform where we could really understand the behavior of our members, what they’re interacting with, what their preferences are, and then to use that channel to surface relevant offers to them.

Nancy: And that could be within the Skywards Every Day partner ecosystem, or even from the wider partner ecosystem, where we can cross sell some products or partnerships into the app.

Nancy: And we do quite a lot of gamified challenges now that are very popular.

Nancy: We’ve seen some great results.

Nancy: And we’re just in the middle of an initiative with LJI to do hyper-personalized offers to a targeted group using gen.ai.

Lisa: Wow.

Nancy: And again, through a gamified challenge, but we’re really, really excited to see how that will work because I think that will take us to another level of really being able to put the right offer in front of the member.

Lisa: Amazing.

Lisa: I mean, with Skywards, you’ve got a Skywards Everyday app.

Lisa: We’ve talked about 70 partners, talked about your fraud team, talked about how large the team is.

Lisa: It’s a lot of effort putting partnerships together.

Lisa: I think people sometimes underestimate that or don’t see the full picture, because you are curating a customer experience in an app, you are doing the marketing, you are negotiating, there’s so many elements.

Lisa: So when you’re looking at hiring or putting that team structure together, what are you looking for in a partnerships manager or partnerships team that is going potentially above and beyond what a normal account manager might do?

Lisa: Because it’s quite complex.

Nancy: It really is.

Nancy: And I often see CVs that come across my desk where people have got strong relationship management background.

Nancy: And partnerships at Skywards is not just about that.

Nancy: It is really running a business end to end, as you were just talking about.

Nancy: So the person that we bring into the team has got to be very adaptable and have a very dynamic learning capability as well.

Nancy: So it can start off with market research and move into commercial negotiations.

Nancy: And then it’s business case.

Nancy: And now you’re moving into the project streams of marketing, tech, data privacy, cyber security.

Nancy: And while you’ve got stakeholders internally who are supporting you with that, you are running, you are leading those streams, and you’re bringing the partner on board with you to make sure you all align at launch.

Nancy: Then you launch the partnership.

Nancy: Now you’ve got to make that partnership work.

Nancy: You’ve got to meet the KPIs, meet the business case, make sure your members are engaged, and to be able to look at it and say, okay, this customer value proposition, maybe we need to adjust it, maybe it’s not working.

Nancy: We need to do marketing.

Nancy: So it’s all of that.

Nancy: And it is very important to have people, individuals in the team who can really cope with a multi-faceted role.

Nancy: Somebody who’s coming in to sort of say, this is my JD bullet point one to five, that’s not going to work.

Nancy: And I think that somebody obviously who can think strategically, laterally is comfortable working in multi-cultural environments, different ways of working as well with different partners, because we have global partners.

Nancy: That is very important to have.

Nancy: And I always think about this when we have all of these conversations about AI, but character and personality are very important, especially when you’re in a consumer facing role in loyalty and in an airline.

Nancy: So whilst I mentioned that building relationships is not the only part of partnerships, it is obviously a big part of partnerships.

Nancy: So having the right person to be able to sit in front of a partner, but also work, manage stakeholders, run a business, it’s quite a challenge to find somebody who can fit the bill.

Lisa: Yeah, I can imagine.

Lisa: It’s funny, we’ve migrated in loyalty where trying to get the business to understand that loyalty itself is a business in its own right.

Lisa: And then also partnerships in a way as a function is a business in its own right, because of the multi skills that an individual or a team need to have to be able to bring that through.

Lisa: And like you rightly say, on top of once you’ve done all that, you have to then have your business reviews and keep that partnership going.

Lisa: So yeah, sometimes it’s not about the CV or the skills.

Lisa: Sometimes it’s just about the person that can do it.

Nancy: Yeah, you’re absolutely right.

Lisa: So we are going to wrap up soon.

Lisa: It always goes so fast.

Lisa: I always say that.

Lisa: I get so fascinated by conversations.

Lisa: But before we do wrap up, there’s probably a lot of listeners here on the podcast that are running loyalty programs, potentially looking at their partnership strategy.

Lisa: What advice would you have to them thinking about how they go about structuring their strategies?

Nancy: So, I suppose if you’re, you know, it depends whether you’re in kind of the foundations of building that strategy or whether you have already built it, but you’re looking to see where to go next.

Nancy: But actually, wherever you are in that journey, I think what’s important is to take a step back, take a pause and say, what do our members want?

Nancy: How can we as a brand engage with those members?

Nancy: How are we going to create that emotional connection with them?

Nancy: Not about what we want and what we think works.

Nancy: What’s going to work for them?

Nancy: And, you know, sometimes it’s good to do some surveys, whether they’re qualitative, quantitative surveys, just to really understand what it is that your members are looking for.

Nancy: I think, yeah, as I said, it’s so easy as a business to say, oh, yes, we’ve got a great idea, or we’ve got a great partner opportunity.

Nancy: Yes, tick.

Nancy: Yeah, but is it addressing perhaps a gap that you have, a member segment that you haven’t been able to reach?

Nancy: And bigger is not always better.

Nancy: So it’s really understanding what your member wants and how they are going to best engage with you.

Lisa: Amazing.

Lisa: Starts with the member.

Nancy: It absolutely starts with the member.

Nancy: Always starts with the member.

Lisa: Always starts with the member.

Lisa: And so the next frontier for Skywards and partnerships, what’s the future hold, do you think?

Nancy: So we actually have a few things kind of hot off the press.

Lisa: I like that when that happens.

Nancy: So we launched Skywards Rail.

Nancy: That was last month or two months ago.

Nancy: And this was fantastic because we currently didn’t offer this within the Skywards program ecosystem.

Nancy: And we now have, I think it’s over 12,000 destinations in Europe with 40 train operators.

Nancy: So for example, the Heathrow Express.

Nancy: You can-

Lisa: I did not know that.

Nancy: You can use your miles on Heathrow Express next time you’re in Heathrow.

Lisa: Oh, perfect.

Nancy: Yeah.

Nancy: So that’s very exciting.

Nancy: And we’ve seen some very strong engagements since that launched.

Nancy: We’ve also got Skywards Box Office.

Nancy: And that really is very, very new, newly launched.

Nancy: So that started life as Skywards Exclusives, which was where our members could redeem miles for hospitality and seats at our Emirates sponsored events.

Nancy: And we still have that.

Nancy: But now we’ve expanded that platform to bring in global events and entertainment content, like you would find on Platinum List or Ticketmaster.

Nancy: So now we can cater to a global audience, which is absolutely fantastic and all different audiences.

Nancy: And we will shortly be launching, very shortly be launching a financial product in the UK.

Lisa: Oh, nice.

Nancy: Which is very exciting.

Nancy: I can’t say too much more about it.

Lisa: Okay.

Nancy: And then the other huge sort of project that we’re working on in Skywards at the moment is the migration to a new loyalty platform.

Nancy: And this is a very, very large project that has been going on for a couple of years now.

Nancy: We’re in, I would say, the final stages of that, which is very exciting.

Nancy: It will unlock to our members a whole way in which we can hyper-personalize offers and benefits to them, working with sort of technology and marketing as well.

Nancy: So we are super excited about that.

Lisa: Amazing.

Lisa: Now, I know that’s been in the works for a long time.

Lisa: So it’s good to hear there’s an end date on that.

Lisa: Amazing.

Lisa: And we can’t do anything in our work if we can’t have the technology to help us facilitate that.

Lisa: So it’s great that you’re going to get that live by July.

Lisa: So amazing.

Lisa: Well, thank you, Nancy.

Lisa: It’s been a real pleasure to have you today.

Lisa: And thank you for coming on Loyalty TV and Let’s Talk Loyalty.

Nancy: Thank you, Lisa.

Nancy: It’s fantastic to be here.

Lisa: Thank you.

Paula: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Let’s Talk Loyalty.

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