#361: Cathay Pacific’s Lifestyle & Wellness Innovations (Short Summary Show)

Paula: Welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty, an Industry podcast for loyalty marketing professionals. I’m Paula Thomas, The Founder of Let’s Talk Loyalty. Today’s episode is hosted by Tom Peace, Managing Director of The Loyalty People, a strategic consultancy with a laser focus on loyalty, CRM, and customer engagement.

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Tom: Hi, I’m Tom Peace, Managing Director of The Loyalty People. Welcome to this week’s episode of Let’s Talk A Little Loyalty. This week, my summary podcast showcases Paula’s interview with Paul Smitton, Director of Customer Lifestyle at Cathay Pacific Airways.

Cathay Pacific are part of the amazing Air Miles Coalition program where members can earn Air Miles across a range of services from flights, hotels, dining, retail, telco, and finance, as well as lifestyle and wellness programs. This is an incredibly powerful coalition with multiple airlines in the alliance as well as other partners that provides incredible value and variety for their members. Cathay themselves are an extremely innovative business, and this interview with Paul highlights, first of all, the great solution they have brought to the Hong Kong market around health and wellness.

Cathay members can integrate their lifestyle techs such as Garmin or Fitbit so that they can earn free Asia miles for completing their daily exercise. Essentially rewarding people with air miles when they hit their wellness goals, which is really cool. This is something that health and fitness brands do elsewhere around the world.

But to my knowledge, there isn’t any other airlines linking their rewards to wellness in this way. Cathay also takes us further by offering fitness support and guidance, and offering health and critical illness insurance through a partner. Furthermore, the data collected on someone’s healthy habits can then be used to reduce their insurance premiums, adding yet further value to the customer and locking them into the Cathay brand.

Looking into the Future Cathay are looking at other insurance products such as travel insurance when you book your flight. This is a fantastic example of using customer data and partnerships in a way that is truly valuable and enriching for the customer.

Paul goes on to talk about how important it is to have multiple customer communication channels, all of which are connected so that the customer has a seamless engagement. Cathay, have created new communication channels across WhatsApp App Chatbot to complement their traditional channels, and this has been very well received by their members.

This interview has been a pleasure to review and it’s a fantastic coalition program, and Cathay have created really valuable customer innovations. Paul clearly has customer experience at the heart of his business growth strategy, and he understands how to create value for the customers across their lives, not just their air travel needs.

There are some strong learnings here for any program manager, not just in airline. I’d highly recommend listening to the show, which can be found at www.let’stalkloyalty.com and first aired on the 24th of February, 2022. Episode number 189. Thanks for listening, I hope you enjoyed my summary Show all the best and speak soon. Tom.

Paula: This show is sponsored by The Wise Marketer, the world’s most popular source of loyalty marketing, news, insights, and research. The Wise Marketer also offers loyalty marketing training through its loyalty academy, which has already certified over 500 executives in 38 countries as certified loyalty marketing professionals.

For more information, check out thewisemarketer.com, at loyaltyacademy.org.

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