By Kate Harvey
Writer | Kaituhi
We’ve surveyed 22 popular loyalty programmes, spanning restaurants, supermarkets, retail, entertainment, fuel and air travel. Which offer the best value, and which aren’t worth signing up for?
Loyalty programmes used to be simple. Remember the days when you’d just do your shopping, hand over a card to collect your points and eventually receive a voucher or something free?
Now, these programmes are much more complicated. It’s tricky to get your head around how they all work and to know what benefits you’re actually getting from the space they take up in your wallet and on your phone.
Loyalty programmes all have some things in common. They all have the goal of winning your loyalty: getting you to spend more on their own goods or services and stopping you from shopping with a competitor. They also involve you handing over data in exchange for a little treat. Looking into some of the most popular ones, we’ve discovered that sometimes that treat is so tiny it’s just not worth it.
Among the 22 loyalty programmes we looked into, we found a couple that offer a decent return rate of about 10%.
We’ve then divided the rest up into the value they actually offer – high value, OK value, ones that depend on how much you use them, and those that are pretty much just a marketing tool. Our assessment is based on:
what these programmes cost to join
what you earn
how easy the benefits are to use
how much pressure you’re under to sign up
how much time you have to redeem the rewards.
The best approach with loyalty cards is to participate only if you’d be spending money with that company anyway. Don’t spend more than you otherwise would, and don’t let the loyalty programme stop you getting better deals elsewhere.
5 stars: NZ’s 2 most generous loyalty programmes
4 stars: High-value loyalty programmes
3 stars: OK-value loyalty programmes
2 stars: Well … it depends how much you use them
1 star: Mostly marketing
What have we missed?
Which loyalty programme do you rate most highly? Let us know in the comments.
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