Take a moment to consider the following: Who are the most valuable passengers to the airline? How do the airlines track and measure total passenger loyalty?
Today, airline loyalty members represent between 20% and 70% of total pax depending on the airline, and it means there is a significant percentage of passengers who are not program members.
The more sophisticated airline loyalty programs have deployed an airline-wide approach to loyalty. For these airlines, it’s not about what elite status a passenger holds, but rather, what is the share of wallet from every passenger, regardless of if that passenger is a member or not.
So what the heck is a shadow member?
Fundamentally, a shadow member is a customer that has not explicitly signed up to the loyalty program.
These customers are being monitored in the same way that a member would be – through creating a history of transactions, flight activity, calls and emails to the contact centre, website and app usage.
The only difference is that these shadow members:
- Are not accruing miles and points with the airline
- Are not earning status recognition outside of their cabin of travel
- Are not [yet] motivated by earning miles and points from the airline
- Receive different marketing communication and generally in a different CRM channel
- Generally not managed by the airline loyalty department
Unfortunately, the majority of airlines in the world treat these non-loyalty-members, as first-time passengers. I say, unfortunately, because, the big boys can use this intelligence to systematically steal customers from other airlines.
This puts smaller and less-switched-on carriers at risk of losing high-value passengers without realising what’s happening.
There’s an underground war being played out in the airline loyalty game – and the majority of airlines have no idea it’s happening TO THEM. These carriers still (through no fault of their own) simply continue to buy into the narrative that airline loyalty is a marketing or customer service function. Or, quite frankly – they’re blinded by co-brand credit card revenue.
