#388: Relaunching The Shangri-La Hotel Rewards Program (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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This episode is brought to you by Collinson, worldwide leaders in Customer Engagement and Loyalty. Creating and orchestrating customer engagement and loyalty initiatives and programs for some of the world’s biggest brands in travel, retail, and financial services. Doing it globally for over 30 years. Want to know more? Go to collinsongroup.com.

Tom: Hi, I’m Tom Peace, Managing director of The Loyalty People and presenter of Let’s Talk A Little Loyalty. Welcome to this week’s short summary show on behalf of Let’s Talk Loyalty, this week my Let’s Talk a little loyalty podcast showcases Paula’s interview with Kevin Siew, Formerly Vice President and head of Shangri-La Circle, the latest innovation from the Shangri-La International Premium Global Hotel Management Group.

Shangri-La are globally recognized as one of the most luxurious hotel chains to stay in, and they have circa 11 million members in their loyalty program. However, as Kevin tells us in his interview, these members tend to be business travelers staying 20 to 30 nights a year. These highly frequent and valuable members enjoy the benefits of a traditional earn and burn program with tiered benefits and status related upgrades.

This has worked incredibly well for many years. But Shangri-La needed an update focused on their leisure and family customers. Kevin talks about the opportunity that the leisure and family’s customers represent the group and how the business decided to look at the long-term customer lifetime value. This posed the question about what these less frequent customers really want from Shangri-La and how the business could address this low frequency group of customers.

What they did was to innovate the program in three ways. Firstly, they allow rewards to be earned across all spend with the group, such as food and beverage and merchandise. This opened up the loyalty experience to members who love to visit the hotels for other reasons than staying over. Secondly, Shangri-La implemented partnerships for redemption through brands like Amazon, Apple, and Airlines.

This creates interesting and valuable ways to burn rewards and drives engagement. As we all know, burn drives earn. Lastly, and I think most cleverly Shangri-La started to focus on their content and experiences, especially those that could be enjoyed outside of the hotel environment. This gives members a reason to engage with the brand through the app at times when they are not looking to actually book a stay.

This is a very good strategy that has worked incredibly well for Shangri-La. They have created value in their rewards for an entirely different customer group than the loyalty program normally attracts. They can speak to the customer group about interesting offers and experiences and generate positive emotional connections around family events and seasonal occasions, bringing Shangri-La our brand into the family in a very positive way. I’d highly recommend listening to the main show, which can be found at www.letstalkloyalty.com, and first aired on the 22nd of April, 2022. Episode number 213. Thanks for listening, I hope you enjoyed my summary Show all the best, and speak to you 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 is 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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