In praise of loyalty schemes

Asserting Customer Loyalty

I consider myself an advocate for loyalty schemes, as I have participated in a few, some of which offered benefits I never utilised when I was unable to take full advantage of them.

However, I have found the best perks in the hospitality industry. The benefits and rights you receive as a loyal customer can greatly surpass those of a casual, unregistered user of a service.

One case in point was when I had the Accor Favourite Guest Card, which I lost almost 15 years ago. While visiting Berlin and checking into a hotel I had used many times before, a Mercure brand hotel, the check-in clerk informed me that the hotel was fully booked.

That was not what the Accor Favourite Guest Card guaranteed; I had a room in the hotel of my choice secured, no questions asked, and I asserted that fact. Their suggestion was to put me up in another hotel for one night and return to my chosen hotel for the last three nights.

I refused, stating to the clerk that I didn’t want to be moving around Berlin like a prostitute. I gave them twenty minutes to come up with a better proposal: a booking in another hotel of the same standard or better for the four nights, which they did, even paying for the taxi to transport me to a hotel suite in an even more exclusive part of Berlin.

The Tangible Value of Loyalty

Without my loyalty program, I would not have been able to negotiate that outcome. After leaving the Accor Favourite Guest Card scheme, I joined the Hotels.com rewards program, which gives you a monetary average of every accumulated 10-night stay as a reward night to help offset the costs of staying at hotels booked through that app.

Since 2013, I have saved over £4,500 using my loyalty reward nights, but they have changed the scheme. Aside from not understanding how the new system works, I feel it is not as beneficial. Additionally, I have secured some good deals through Booking.com.

Having once lived in the Netherlands, I became a frequent flyer with KLM, which later merged with Air France as part of the SkyTeam alliance. Over the years, I have earned statuses and miles that covered my return flights to India in 2011 and to South Africa in June 2024.

With this loyalty scheme comes priority boarding, extra baggage allowance, a choice of seating, an air mile multiplier for each Euro spent, depending on status, along with complimentary access to the lounge if you hold a gold status. For years, I had platinum status until the aftermath of the pandemic reduced it to just Silver.

Choose and Stick with It

In my view, everything must be done to maintain at least a minimal loyalty allegiance, rather than starting from scratch again. My frequent flyer miles and hotel reward benefits have been invaluable in saving upfront costs. Choose a brand carefully, study what they offer, and how it compares to the competition, then make a commitment.

It might be pricier, but your patronage amounts to something significant; there is value in storing loyalty rather than endlessly chasing the most affordable price from anyone offering a service. Being a creature of habit by adopting a loyalty scheme is not such a bad thing.

With loyalty store cards, you occasionally receive discounts from the retail price, which can be up to 50% or more. As one supermarket suggests, “Every little helps.” 

You can only play the cards you have

The things that I watch

I am a fan of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that anytime I light up my Amazon Fire Stick 4K*, I log on to YouTube and catch the most recent episodes that were recorded within the last 24 hours. The kind of insight and commentary he brings to the issues of the day usually has me applauding from my sofa in awe.

One section of his monologues that intrigues me is the lead-in to his Meanwhile polemics, it is made up of two counterintuitive deliveries almost nonsensical yet quite studied, I have myself wishing I could write like that. Then again, talk shows have writers, so these are more a confluence of crazy ideas than the individual genius of one, though the innovation itself might just be that of one person. What do I know?

The cards you’re dealt

Anyway, in another segment that gets played every few weeks, a guest is invited to participate in the Stephen Colbert Questionert, a series of 15 questions that presume to give a better knowledge of the person being interviewed. On this occasion, it was James Taylor who for the last question, Describe the rest of your life in five words, answered, “Play the cards I’m dealt.”

Now, I am not a card player, I only barely know anything about hands in poker even as I have if I remember correctly written code to randomly deal cards to present a winning poker hand, 2-Pair, Royal Flush, 4 of a kind, that sort of thing. I doubt I would ever have the proficiency to play cards for money and not that I would countenance that level of folly.

Any fool’s poker

However, I understand a few principles around the game, when cards are dealt, you cannot choose what you get, that’s just luck or fate, depending on how you view things. When the betting starts, reviewers might suggest the hand you have has more chance of winning the pot than the other person. Then other cards are put on the table, so that between the 3 you have in your hand and the 2 that end up on the table, you come to a decision, on who has the better hand.

Forgive my amateurish descriptions. Sometimes, you’ll fold because you do not think you have a chance, maybe you can raise the ante because you are surer about what you have got, then, there is a bluffing where you suggest you have the best hand and dare the other person to call your bluff, beyond the basic skill, it becomes a game of wits. Someone with the right kind of resolve can win over a good hand and this happens.

Fundamentally, whichever way the game goes, you can only play what you have got, never what you wish you had. Then even if you had everything in line but your bluff was not up to standard, the game might end early without you getting others to commit more to the pot for a bigger win. Let me exit the stage left at this point.

You can only play what you have

In life, we analogously in a card game where by fortitude, destiny, luck, fate, or blessing, we are dealt an experience of life that we have to live to the best of the capabilities and possibilities we possess. Nothing is perfect and even the perfect goes awry. We are left with having to live life as we find it and make the best of it to the squander or the prosper, then it could just be average and that in itself may not essentially be bad, just do your bit.

We can daydream and wish we were living another life, get into a transponder and be translated into that alternate universe where all those dreams are living realities in the midst of the same faces and issues of life. A good hand in a bad setting of a paltry pot for the winnings. You begin to realise the futility of it all, for no matter the number of infinite universes we might visit, the same human issues will exist. We might as well stick with the universe we know rather than the one we are introduced to as newly arrived foreigners in a strange land.

This is not against the march of progress, we can do a lot with what we have, we can have dreams, live with hope and march towards the realisation with purpose and determination. We can only do that with what we have rather than what we wish for. And so, I could well understand what James Taylor meant by “Play the cards I’m dealt.”, for life whichever way you live it or refuse to live it would always be, what you make it. And from the music, according to Leon Patillo, ‘all of your dreams can come true.’

Blog - The bird in hand is all you have

* All my media content is now delivered through this device to my Smart TV, I switched off my TiVo device over 2 months ago because it was just consuming electricity, the device allows me to download all the apps I need to watch everything I am interested in.

Cupping coffee

Quite early for a drink

I found myself asking, where are our cocktails? Surely, they are not being made in heaven and needing a prayer of faith with the miracle of changing water into wine, just at our tables. Soon, they arrived without the need for a prayer on our lips, our yearning and expectations met as the ice entombed slices of lime and lemon in the glass.

Blood orange juice, gin, Cointreau, chilled prosecco and lime came to Alcoholic named as Blood orange French and Pom fizz which was lighter on the palate with pomegranate juice and chilled prosecco was served to Anonymous.

Stirring much curiosity

He puts a teaspoon of sugar in his flat white cup of coffee, the cup having no handles that he has to cup it between his hands as a warmer to take a drink. I could not decide after he put the sugar in his coffee if he was stirring or doodling, but soon after he did have to stir in the sugar, so, my first observation about doodling was right.

Apparently, she looks like a Karen. Pray, what is a Karen look? Surely not Donna Karan. Now, the waiter or waitron as they are apparently known on the menus in Cape Town has noticed I am taking notes, he thinks I am writing reviews of the food and probably describing something, not to my liking, which I am not at this time. What have I been writing about?

No one takes AMEX

So far, I have written nothing about our meals, our choices were good and tasty. We were at Hemelhuijs or Heaven’s house, the U appears as a V on the building sign, I guess we’ll touch the subject of meals another time.

When paying, the invoice said only Mastercard or Visa accepted, it made for a good joke to the waitron when I told of our visit to Simon’s Restaurant at Groot Constantia, the bill came in an American Express folder emblazoned with the by-line, the best way to pay is with your AMEX, but the bill strictly noted, only Mastercard and Visa were acceptable. Funny and ironic at the same time. All the waitrons agreed.