Travelers are changing in 2022. In the short term, travel suppliers are seeing a release of pent-up leisure demand as Covid-19 restrictions wane. While business travelers have yet to return en masse, a vast majority of companies are confident that 2022 will inject a lot more business travel volume to the market.

Both groups—leisure and business travelers—will be looking for similar things from travel suppliers. They are looking for a commitment to health, safety and hygiene. More than ever before, they are looking for travel suppliers that align with their values, like commitment to environmental sustainability, diversity, equity and inclusion or a clear community focus. They are also looking for personalization, a seamless travel experience and—it will never go away—WIIFM: What's in it for me? That means loyalty programs and reward schemes.

In the past, loyalty programs largely have been the concern of frequent business travelers. While anyone can sign up for a loyalty program, you have to travel quite a lot to earn elite status. The value of loyalty has been to capture the hearts of the most active travelers and pull that lucrative wallet share across all aspects of the supplier portfolio. As such, programs traditionally have been built on points systems that encourage spending, with earning and redemption escalating to higher tiers with more personalized and valuable benefits.

This model will shift in 2022 as travel suppliers come to terms with the fact that travelers have changed, point earnings have cratered and, for most leisure and business travelers, it will not bounce back quickly. Most hotels and airlines already have extended point expiration dates and offered year-to-year status continuity, some into 2023. They've tweaked their programs in dozens of ways to bridge existing loyalty members to the other side of Covid-19. This may not be enough to keep these programs relevant as a new traveler emerges from the pandemic crucible.

There are drastically fewer road warriors flying and staying midweek. Indeed, leisure and business travelers in 2022 will look more similar than ever: Leisure travel pattens are changing, with holidaymakers beginning their trips on Thursdays instead of Fridays and Zooming into office meetings from their vacation destination for a day. Business travelers getting the chance to take a trip are making the most of the opportunity and staying on for pleasure.

Loyalty programs will need to become less transactional and learn to play well across leisure and business travel segments. Hotels and airlines will need to play the long game to keep their loyalty members engaged and remain their top choice.

Rather than operating on points accumulation in exchange for spend or room nights, loyalty programs will need to tap into all those reasons travelers choose a particular hotel—health consciousness, sustainability, community—and reward them for those aligned values. Creative micro-rewards for using mobile check-in rather than the front desk or for foregoing daily cleaning services could key into the ethos of a digital native, while also alleviating costs and staffing-challenged properties. For business travelers, earning points for booking small hotel meeting spaces or flexible workspaces would be relevant, as would offering those options as rewards for other behaviors. Small- and midsize business users, which have been the first business volume to return during the pandemic, might jump at the chance to engage with a program like that because it addresses their needs.

A new report from the American Hotel & Lodging Association produced in collaboration with Accenture outlines some of the changing dynamics that will push these loyalty trends in 2022. But why should a travel manager care? After all, loyalty programs are the bane of the travel manager's existence, right? They pull travelers away from the corporate travel program and, often, toward suppliers that may be a personal choice but are not the company's preferred supplier.

I have three predictions about how shifting loyalty programs could converge with corporate travel management in the coming year.

1. Understanding traveler motivations. Hotels and airlines have lots of marketing and customer relationship management power behind them. Watching how these travel providers structure loyalty programs could give corporate travel managers a good steer on how to influence travelers in their own programs. From a certain perspective, corporate travel programs and loyalty programs want to achieve similar goals. They want to draw travelers into a closed community and provide exclusive benefits to them. Engaging in long-game loyalty and driving behaviors with seamless travel experience and values alignment will be the name of the game for both types of programs.
   
   
2. Leveraging the value of supplier loyalty. Precisely because loyalty and managed programs have similar goals, they historically have been in conflict for the mindshare of the traveler. Hotel loyalty, in particular, has been problematic given that 50 percent of hotel volume consistently is booked outside the managed travel program. Right now, corporate programs are faced with changing demands from corporate travelers. More employees expect to book with suppliers of their choice, and many corporates have been more willing to give them latitude to do so in a pandemic environment. Reining that back in will be challenging in 2022 as the pandemic drags on, especially if lower room night volumes leave corporates with less power to negotiate amenities. A changing formulation of compliance may come into play, with a concentration on channel compliance and a rate cap taking priority over corporate preferred supplier compliance. This formula would leverage loyalty programs to deliver the amenities. As travel managers rebuild their programs and preferred supplier selections, they will heed new travel patterns and have an awareness of traveler preferences.
    
3. Collaborating on loyalty. I've been banging this drum for a while because it seems like such an important partnership, but I've never seen it happen. I'm holding out hope for 2022. Loyalty programs are built on data. Based on Accenture's new loyalty model, the data stakes are only getting higher to enable suppliers to support that longer engagement strategy, with more loyalty partners and less frequent travel guests. More digitization will produce more data that should play through to more personalization and an enhanced traveler experience. Corporate travel programs also are based on data and have a huge stake in providing the right experience so travelers can be productive and successful. In the end, both programs ultimately share the customer. I predict an industry-leading buyer will find a way to partner more closely with a hotel supplier to pilot a limited—but effective—data program that offers key insights from loyalty data that will enable the corporate to deliver a next-generation business travel experience.

Please, please call me when it happens!