Earlier this month Expedia.com, one of the world’s largest full service online travel sites, unveiled Expedia+ rewards−which is a new and enhanced customer loyalty program.
Expedia+ rewards offers membership at tiered levels, including +blue, +silver and +gold, and even more opportunities to earn and redeem points. Members at the +silver and +gold levels will also receive benefits from more than 1,400 +VIP Access hotels.
All Expedia+ rewards members will earn two points for every $1 spent when booking hotels, activities, and packages. Members can now earn two points for every $1 spent on cruise bookings with most major cruise lines. Customers will continue to earn one point for every $5 spent on flights. Once points begin to accumulate, members can redeem points on hotels, as well as flights, exclusive local experiences (for limited time only), and charity redemptions.
Alison Carpentier, Director of Loyalty Programs at Expedia, participated in a fascinating Q&A with Loyalty360 to discuss the new enhanced loyalty program.
How did Expedia gather customer feedback before launching the refreshed loyalty program?
We launched the first Expedia loyalty program about three years ago and really doubled down on gathering member feedback as the overall loyalty landscape has changed in the past 18 months. With more than six million members in the program, most of whom travel multiple times a year, we have a wide variety of ways to learn from them–both what they say they want in a variety of channels like formal surveys, member comments provided to our customer support agents, and the feedback channel that is consistently accessible on the Expedia.com site–and in what they do and how they respond to programs in real time when they are live on our site.
What metrics will you use to measure success of the enhanced program?
For any loyalty program, and certainly for Expedia+ rewards, it’s all about creating an experience that drives the customer to connect with us in a way that makes them come back again and again. When customers feel valued and rewarded enough to come backorganically, it means we’ve done our jobs well.
How do you stay on top of technology and how does it impact your customer loyalty program and engagement initiatives?
No loyalty program will succeed if the core product offering isn’t compelling; technology is at the heart of that for Expedia. As the Expedia site evolves, we constantly seek to ensure that Expedia+ rewards is evolving with it, and that we are using the program as a tool to help drive customer engagement with new features. For example, Expedia has an award-winning mobile app that provides a great booking experience and also lets you keep track of your 
itineraries on the go, with invaluable notification features in trip that help your travel go more smoothly. To help introduce our best customers to the app, we’ve sweetened the offering with a 500-point bonus for downloading the app, with triple Expedia+ points for all bookings made in the app back in January, and have recently extended this offer to Sept. 30.
How do you define customer loyalty and has that definition evolved or changed in recent years?
A lot of ecommerce companies spent the 90s and early 2000s taking a “one transaction at a time” approach and we were largely part of that pack for much of our early years. With new technologies at the core of our site, we’ve gained better insights into customers more holistically. The result is that the customer, not the transaction, is now at the core of everything we do. Our view of loyalty extends beyond the loyalty program, though the majority of our loyal customers are program members.
Our loyal customers first and foremost are those who purchase from us repeatedly, often across multiple categories of things we sell, who engage with us across our branded channels including the mobile app, social and email, and who use the various site features and programs offered, including formal programs like Expedia+ rewards and features such as Scratchpad which records all your searches for you with current pricing, so you don’t need to jot anything down. Each point of engagement adds value for our customers, and creates more reasons for them to continue using Expedia for their travel needs. That means we need to build an experience on and off-site to meet their expectations. From better personalization and custom deals on the site to warm welcomes at top partner hotels and priority trip support, we look for every opportunity to make our best customers feel like they are getting the best of Expedia and that approach is what builds loyalty.