Suppliers invest heavily in loyalty tiers, currencies, and rewards that keep travelers returning. For many, those investments pay off handsomely. Airline earnings show loyalty programs generating more profit than flying itself, through credit-card partnerships and data monetization.
Hotels, too, have benefited from stronger occupancy and higher room rates driven by brand loyalty. Marriott’s CEO even describes a move from transactional to emotional loyalty, aiming to capture 100 percent of the traveler’s “wallet” across both leisure and business.
Reward, recognition, and the power of influence
Marketing executive Paolo Claussen defined the three Rs of customer loyalty: rewards, recognition, and relevance. He called loyalty “a strategic mechanism used to create profitable long-term relationships with a brand’s customers.” The first two Rs, rewards and recognition, have been used brilliantly across travel. They make travelers feel valued, turning ordinary transactions into emotionally charged choices.
Suppliers have learned to extend those tactics into business travel. Loyalty promotions, upgrades, and personal discounts now follow employees on work trips, shaping behaviors even when they are spending company dollars. In that sense, suppliers have mastered the art of rewards and recognition, but in doing so, they’ve begun to lose sight of the third R.
Claussen’s final principle, relevance, means ensuring that loyalty benefits serve the right customer context. For business travel, that context includes company policies, duty of care, and cost control. Yet today, many supplier actions push the boundaries of what’s relevant to the corporate relationship.
When relevance gets lost
Hotels have led the charge. Long before airlines adopted modern retailing and NDC, major hotel chains built direct-booking strategies that bypassed corporate channels. Programs like Business Access by Marriott Bonvoy, Hilton for Business, and Hyatt Leverage offer leisure-style incentives – discounts, double points, upgrades – designed to pull travelers away from approved booking paths. What began as a push for closer customer relationships has evolved into a strategy to capture full control of the traveler.
At the same time, hotels have quietly expanded fees – resort, facility, even “urban” fees – while scaling back daily housekeeping and amenities. The result is higher prices, fewer services, and less transparency. It’s unbundling without accountability.
The integrity gap
Recent developments make the issue plain. Hotels.com’s new “Save Your Way” feature allows travelers to pay the full rate, expense it to their company, and bank the discounted difference as personal One Key Cash. A $200 stay might cost the traveler only $160, while the company pays the higher amount.
It’s marketed as flexibility, but in practice it encourages employees to act alone, prioritizing personal benefit over company value. Clever? Yes. Relevant? No. Where’s the integrity?
These moves erode the core principles that keep managed travel healthy. They fragment data, weaken duty-of-care safeguards, and shift cost back to employers without full visibility. Loyalty becomes transactional, and partnership optional.
Re-balancing the equation
Claussen’s framework still holds true: loyalty should be a mutual exchange of value. But in corporate travel, there’s a third party in the relationship – the corporation – and that makes relevance even more critical. Suppliers seeking 100 percent of the traveler’s wallet must remember whose money that wallet comes from.
For managed travel to thrive, cooperation must replace control. Buyers lose visibility when suppliers go it alone. Suppliers lose trust and long-term share when they bypass the ecosystem that sustains them. Travelers risk undermining their own programs when personal rewards outweigh professional responsibility.
Corporate travel leaders must act. Insist on visibility, protect duty of care, and ensure innovation serves companies and travelers alike. As airlines push direct connect and hotels pursue book-direct strategies, companies should re-establish firm oversight of hotel spend, putting the same discipline around accommodation that already exists for air.
Loyalty should strengthen relationships, not weaponize them. When rewards and recognition outweigh relevance, everyone loses.
