Two recent loyalty announcements made the same bet:
- In July, Global Hotel Alliance added personalized City Unscripted city tours to GHA DISCOVERY in 15 destinations, with members saving 20% when they book through the GHA website or app.
- On October 1, 2026, Atmos Rewards, the combined Alaska and Hawaiian program, grew Atmos Communities from two groups to six. Each of the four new ones, Global Locals, Families on the Go, Culinary Journeys and Active Escapes, comes with 20% off select, community-specific experiences, and new lifestyle partners are on the way.
Not every experience benefit is a points redemption. But both moves point to the same shift: loyalty value depends on what members can actually use, not only what they earn.
A hotel alliance and an airline program, built on very different economics, reached for the same lever. Not another way to earn. Something better to spend on, matched to who the member is.
That is the right instinct. It is also where the hard part starts.
Earning got the attention
For two decades, program design has centered on earning. More partners, more card spend, more bonus categories. Earning is where the acquisition story lives, so earning gets the budget.
Spending got the leftovers. In many programs, the redemption menu still looks much as it did ten years ago: flights, room nights, a merchandise catalog, gift cards.
Members notice. A balance with nothing worth spending it on stops feeling like a reward and starts feeling like a number. And members who stop believing their points are worth something stop changing their behavior to earn them. Finance teams see the same problem from the other side, as an obligation the program carries until the member redeems.
Why experiences
Flights and room nights will remain at the core of travel redemption. But they are among the most expensive things a program can give away, and the least personal. One member's free night looks like every other member's free night.
Experiences work differently. A food tour in Lisbon, a museum in Rome, a game in Miami. They cost less to fulfill, and the member remembers them and talks about them.
They also say something about the member, which is exactly what GHA and Atmos are reaching for. GHA describes each City Unscripted experience as tailored to the individual traveler. Atmos sorts members by how they like to travel. Both are using experiences to show the member that the program knows them.
Targeting is moving faster than menus
Here is the gap. Programs are getting much better at knowing what a member wants: interest cohorts, travel history, card spend, app behavior. Atmos Communities is a clear, public version of it. A member tells the program they travel for food, and the program can act on that.
Knowing is the easier half. The harder half is having something to put in front of that member, in the city they are landing in, on the dates they are there, bookable inside the program.
That is a supply problem, and it does not get solved the way earning partnerships do. A brand partnership is negotiated once and announced once. Experience supply is hundreds of thousands of products from thousands of operators, each with its own availability, pricing, cancellation rules and settlement terms, changing daily.
A partnership produces a headline. It does not, on its own, produce a Saturday afternoon in Lisbon for the member whose profile says Culinary Journeys. The distance between knowing what a member wants and having something they can actually book is where most experience programs stall.
What it takes to run experiences as part of the program
Programs that treat experiences as part of the core proposition, rather than a side catalog, need three things.
#1 Supply at scale
- Enough coverage that a cohort-based offer holds up in the places members actually go, not only the ten most popular cities.
#2 Relevance
- A large catalog does not help if it shows everything to everyone. The value is in matching the right experience to the right member at the right moment. We don't want to give travelers a library. We want to give them the right book.
#3 The program's own brand
- The member should book inside the program's app or site, pay in points or cash, and never feel handed off to someone else. Loyalty is built on that relationship. Sending members elsewhere to redeem gives part of it away.
Most loyalty teams already own the hard parts of program logic: tiers, rules, member data. What they rarely have is the commerce layer underneath: connections to many supplier networks, normalized into one feed, with live availability and booking.
The menu is the product
For members, the redemption menu is the part of the program they experience most directly. Earning runs in the background. Spending is the moment they decide whether the program was worth it.
GHA and Atmos have both made that bet in public. The programs that follow will be judged less on how cleverly they segment members, and more on whether there is something worth booking at the end of the segment.
The next advantage in loyalty is knowing what a member wants and having it ready to book.
About Bridgify
Bridgify, part of HBX Group, provides the infrastructure behind travel experiences. Through one integration, airlines, hotels, travel platforms, banks and loyalty programs offer more than 1 million bookable experiences across 180+ countries, inside their own channels and under their own brand.
Bridgify aggregates and normalizes supply from multiple networks and adds AI-driven matching, so each member sees the right experience at the right moment. Founded in 2019 by Amit Shamni and Yaniv Green, Bridgify became part of HBX Group in May 2026.
Sources
GHA and City Unscripted announcement, The Wise Marketer; Atmos Rewards expansion, Alaska Airlines newsroom; Atmos Communities launch details, Business Traveller
