For years, hotel loyalty programs were built around a relatively predictable formula: stay more often, accumulate points and redeem them for free nights or room upgrades.
That model remains important, but it no longer fully reflects what many travelers want.
Increasingly, loyalty is being defined by the entire trip—not simply the hotel stay.
That is pushing hospitality companies to add benefits involving dining, transportation, cruises, vacation rentals and local experiences.
For Global Hotel Alliance (GHA), the operator of the GHA DISCOVERY loyalty program, the challenge is to expand beyond hotels without becoming another sprawling marketplace filled with loosely connected offers.
Kristi Gole of Global Hotel Alliance says the company’s partnership strategy is intentionally selective.
“It’s not about scale; it’s about finding the right fit,” Gole told me. “It’s quality over quantity.”
Partnerships Must Do More Than Add Logos
GHA evaluates partnerships across several dimensions. The first is customer acquisition: Can a partner introduce travelers who are likely to stay across multiple hotel brands, travel internationally and have the means to patronize GHA’s portfolio?
The second is member engagement. GHA wants partnerships to make its loyalty program more valuable between hotel stays and across the broader travel journey.
Its consumer-facing partners include Regent Seven Seas Cruises, luxury home-rental platform Plum Guide, chauffeur service Blacklane and restaurant operator The Wolseley Hospitality Group. These relationships extend GHA DISCOVERY into cruises, private accommodations, ground transportation and dining.
But the collection is deliberately curated. GHA is not simply attempting to offer a partner in every possible category.
“We’re not trying to go deep within certain lifestyle areas,” Gole said. “We’re trying to make sure we cover the main ones so that our customers find something that fits their needs in our program.”
The strategy recognizes that an abundance of choices does not automatically create value. Loyalty programs can become harder to understand when members are confronted with dozens of offers that have little connection to the brand’s identity.
The Partners Help Define The Brand
GHA represents a network of independent hotel brands rather than a single standardized hotel experience. Its partnerships therefore need to reinforce the qualities it wants travelers to associate with the network: upscale, distinctive and locally relevant.
“If we’re going to give you cruise benefits, we’re going to give you cruise benefits with a like-minded cruise partner,” Gole said. “If we’re going to give you tour benefits, we’re going to find a niche player who can deliver what we’re looking for.”
That positioning explains why GHA selected Plum Guide rather than a mass-market home-sharing platform and Blacklane rather than a larger ride-hailing service.
The goal is not exclusivity for its own sake. It is consistency. A loyalty partnership becomes part of the customer experience, even when another company fulfills it. If the partner feels disconnected from the hotel brand, the benefit may add utility while weakening the program’s positioning.
“There are a lot of opportunities out there, but a lot of them we choose not to go forward with because they’re not aligning in a way that positions us the way that our hotels and our customers expect,” Gole said.
Turning A City Tour Into A Loyalty Benefit
GHA’s new relationship with City Unscripted illustrates how this approach works in practice.
The partnership gives GHA DISCOVERY members access to private, locally led tours in 15 cities. Rather than following a fixed sightseeing itinerary, travelers can discuss their interests before arrival and customize the experience with a local host.
The decision was based partly on member behavior. When GHA reviewed the experiences travelers selected through its program, tours and classes emerged as popular choices.
“They might have some really fancy hotel, they might be doing really cool stuff during their itinerary, but they just want a tour of the city,” Gole said.
The difficulty was delivering tours centrally without stripping away their local character. Individual hotels can curate experiences, but doing so across a large network requires time and resources. City Unscripted offered a way to manage the benefit at scale while still using local people to shape each experience.
“It’s kind of like your local friend is giving you a walk around the city,” Gole said. “It is completely customized to what you want to do—showing you the best neighborhoods, the hidden gems and things that are custom to what you like.”
GHA DISCOVERY members receive preferred pricing and a pre-arrival conversation to help personalize the tour. Gole cited a four-hour Sydney experience for two as an example: approximately $260 when booked directly, compared with about $190 through GHA DISCOVERY.
Loyalty Is Moving From Currency To Access
GHA previously centered its program on “Local Experiences,” but those benefits were largely available to a relatively small group of top members. When the program was relaunched in 2021, GHA introduced DISCOVERY Dollars, a rewards currency that members can earn and apply toward hotel stays and other purchases.
The shift made rewards accessible to a broader membership base. Partnerships now add another layer by offering preferred access or pricing outside the hotel.
For the moment, GHA says it is generally passing the value created by these partnerships directly to members rather than treating them primarily as a new profit center. Ancillary revenue may become a larger opportunity over time, but the immediate objective is engagement.
That may be the larger lesson for the loyalty industry. Points remain useful, but points alone are increasingly easy to imitate. More distinctive value comes from helping members experience a destination in a way they might not have discovered independently.
The strongest loyalty programs of the future may not be those with the most partners. They may be the ones whose partners make the trip feel more personal.
ByJeff Fromm, Contributor.
