For example, Starbucks loyalty program members generated 57 percent of U.S. revenues in Q2 of 2023, and active loyalty membership rose 15 percent year over year, despite the coffeehouse chain diluting loyalty points value and higher than average nationwide inflation rates at that time. This shows that when loyalty members aren’t driven by convenience and price alone, and instead make habitual buying decisions that might defy rational explanation, travel and dining brands will retain CLV through adverse conditions.

Emotional loyalty vs. behavioral loyalty

On the opposing end, behavioral loyalty is loyalty that’s purely driven by repeated transactions, because of convenience incentives like discounts. Emotional loyalty leads to repeated transactions, but it’s driven by emotion-oriented rewards, like belonging, connection and identity.

For example, loyalty to an airline that is driven purely by perks, discounts and points means that “loyal” customers will be less likely to stay loyal during changes in the market and in the long term, over their lifetime. 

More than 20 million U.S. travel loyalty members alone faced a status downgrade in 2023, due to COVID-related decreases in travel. In this situation, behavioral loyalty members that were attracted by the discounts and the convenience of their status were willing to switch to whichever airline provided the most convenient or discounted option.

When the loyalty KPIs in the first list improve solely in response to financial incentives like discounts or promotions and don’t drive brand affinity, this is purely behavioral loyalty, which won’t drive long-term CLV.

As travel and dining brands switch their focus from behavioral to emotional loyalty, they’ll need to adopt a test-and-learn approach.

These are the top ways travel and dining brands can cultivate emotional loyalty and customer lifetime value in 2024:

AI can surface insights on what customers like, what they’re doing and what they want, and connect those insights together. But companies should be focusing on the ‘why’ behind this data—and that’s where they can create a strategy to drive emotional loyalty.

For example, a QSR brand can surface a segment of millennial customers that order takeout delivery every Sunday—but this insight isn’t helpful without contextual data and insight to understand that it’s because of a TikTok trend, a new HBO show or because of bad weather. It’s important to understand what is driving customer behavior, and what role your products play in their lives.

Customers that are emotionally connected to one brand, like the Ritz Carlton, will most likely be great ambassadors and purchasers of products and services associated with that brand. For a hotel, this could be spa products, the associated golf equipment rentals or the tea that’s served in the room.

To drive emotional loyalty through brand networks, companies can use first-party data to understand which brands customers are connected to within their ecosystem and try to bolster those connections or even find new ones.

Dynamic segmentation, and personalization, requires a modern technological backbone. As companies test-and-learn in 2024, it’s time to leverage current product investments, not reinvent the wheel. It’s more efficient to beta-test and create one new loyalty segment driven by AI sentiment analysis within customer service chats, rather than replace the entire customer engagement platform.

Brands should be thinking about how they can recombine their current tech puzzle pieces (and products) for efficient engineering to drive value for customers.

See and feel your customer experience journey—not just to run your loyalty program successfully, but to understand which parts of the journey might seem like costs but are actually drivers of emotional loyalty and customer lifetime value.

For example, through taking a holistic approach to the customer and employee journey, a restaurant chain might find that one-on-one interaction between employees and customers is an added cost compared to automated POS kiosks, but that these interactions improve customer satisfaction, increase brand affinity and drive customer lifetime value.

Brands need more first- and third-party data to create more dynamic segmentation (and personalization) for retention and acquisition marketing. Often, the data that brands are collecting themselves, like purchase history, isn’t effective for segmentation. Brands need to look to their networks to create cross-industry partnerships, securing contextual data that will round out customer profiles rather than buying massive data sets and seeking to find connections between the data retroactively.

Unfortunately, most brands still aren’t eager to share bits and pieces of customer information. Travel and dining brands need to orchestrate ‘micro-experiments’ with customer data, experimenting and tying together new first- and third-party data sets to identify potential data-sharing partnerships, like the Delta and Starbucks points collaboration.

With many nuances dependent on business type, Publicis Sapient experts have broken down the key priorities for emotional loyalty in each of the biggest travel and dining sectors, based on 2024 predictions within these industries:

Destination Asia: The Asian Development Bank predicts that tourism could accelerate to pre-COVID levels in 2024, as soon as Lunar New Year in February. Airlines and airports can reactivate dormant loyalty members looking to travel to and from the Asia region next year through AI-powered data analysis.

Event-based travel: From Taylor Swift concerts to Olympic games, fans of all kinds will be embarking on international trips for event-based vacations. Hotels can take advantage of fans’ affinities through event-themed collaborations for seamless travel experiences.