Loyalty Revolution: Credit Cards, Memberships and More

Loyalty programs have always been travel’s most powerful retention tool — but the game is changing faster than most brands can keep up with. The credit card co-brand has long been the engine that funds loyalty ecosystems, but a new generation of challengers is rewriting the rules of what loyalty actually means and who gets to play.

Bilt Rewards turned the humble rent payment into a travel currency. Suppliers have continually devalued their own loyalty currencies to the point of irrelevance. Cardless is building co-branded credit products for brands that previously couldn’t afford the table stakes. And the established giants — Chase, Capital One, and AMEX — are in a constant arms race for wallet share, each investing billions to stay relevant to the modern traveler.

But is all this competition actually good for the consumer? Or are we reaching a point of loyalty fatigue, where the proliferation of programs, points currencies, and co-brand offers creates more confusion than value? The redemption landscape has never been more complex, and the value of a point has never been harder to pin down.

Meanwhile, the rise of agentic AI and the personalization it promises could upend loyalty all over again. If an AI agent is managing your travel search and booking, whose loyalty program does it optimize for — yours or the algorithm’s? And if the booking is invisible to the consumer, what happens to the emotional bond that loyalty programs have traditionally built?

At the same time, hotels, airlines, and OTAs are asking harder questions about who actually owns the customer relationship — and whether loyalty points are even the right currency to build it around. Subscription models, membership programs, and lifestyle-first brands are emerging as serious alternatives to the points-and-miles playbook.

With a remarkable range of players — from legacy banks to fintech disruptors to next-gen co-brand platforms — converging on the same consumer, this episode digs into what loyalty really means right now. Are we on the cusp of a loyalty renaissance, or watching a system built for a different era crack under the weight of its own complexity?

Follows

Gilad Berenstein – host

Cara Whitehill - host

Brian Kelly — guest

Aaron Glick — guest

Go Deeper

• Loyalty Programs May Be the One Asset Agents Can’t Take — Hospitality Net
• When Loyalty Points Stop Acting Like Money — The Wise Marketer
• Hilton Honors Points Devaluation Hits Luxury Hotels Hard in 2025 — Aviation A2Z
• What’s Next for Hotel Loyalty in 2025 — Skift Research
• Morgan Stanley Sees Travel Credit Cards Testing Banks’ Edge — TheStreet