The 2026 Asia-Pacific Loyalty Awards recognises organisations finding new ways to earn and keep customer loyalty across the region.
In the week of the event, we heard from several loyalty leaders and finalists about what customers value most in 2026, how brands should be thinking about member acquisition, and where AI-powered personalisation is heading.
Their answers reflect a market under pressure. Customers expect more from the brands they choose, acquisition costs continue to climb, and the gap between generic offers and genuine personalisation is widening. The businesses responding well are those treating loyalty as a long-term relationship built on data, relevance and immediate value.
Let’s dive in!
Dean Enticott, Head of Loyalty & CRM, Adairs
For customers in 2026, what’s the most important part of loyalty?
Today’s customers are looking for more than a traditional loyalty program. They want a sense of inspiration and genuine connection. Loyalty has evolved, and expectations have grown with it. It’s no longer enough to send offers or provide free delivery. Customers want to feel understood and valued. The programs that win customer loyalty are the ones that enrich the experience, speak to personal needs, and make choosing that brand feel effortless and rewarding every time.
What should retailers or brands be doing now more than ever to drive signups?
Signups matter, but meaningful signups matter more. Retailers need to attract customers who will build a long-term relationship with the brand, not just join for a single transaction. To do this, brands must offer a clear and compelling value exchange. When customers feel confident that sharing their details will lead to thoughtful benefits, tailored experiences and genuine relevance, they’re far more likely to engage deeply and stay loyal.
What does the next phase of AI-powered personalisation and loyalty look like?
Personalisation and loyalty have always moved together, and AI is now taking them to a new level. For years, brands have focused on delivering the right message to the right customer at the right moment.
The next evolution goes further, pairing the right message with the right incentive, one that feels intuitive for the customer and commercially smart for the business. With tools like spend-propensity models and AI-driven offer engines, brands can create experiences that feel more tailored, more timely and more rewarding than ever before.
Bronwyn Barberel, Head of Loyalty, Z Energy
For customers in 2026, what’s the most important part of loyalty?
It is important to stay focused on creating emotional connections with customers, in a world where we continue to put digital solutions in the way of real connection. It is all about emotional connection and creating those dopamine hits and that lovely moment about leaving on a high.
All of those things that when you get deep into the detail of delivering a program, you forget that it is not about the bits and bites and the integrations, but rather creating that emotional connection.
For us getting that reminder coming here this year has been really helpful at a time when we’ve just launched four months ago. After getting it out there, it is now about making sure you get that emotional connection between our customer service reps and our customers.
What does the next phase of AI-powered personalisation and loyalty look like?
AI and data are providing some really interesting efficiency gains to the loyalty industry. However, I think we need to be really careful that we’re not looking for technology to solve things.
We actually still need to make business decisions and really clear business goals, rather than have technology drive our decisions about what we are doing. There are some really neat efficiencies, but we need to be driving that from a business point of view first.
Jonathan Reeve, Regional Sales Director, ANZ, Eagle Eye
For customers in 2026, what’s the most important part of loyalty?
Relevance is becoming the defining factor in loyalty. As consumers experience brands that genuinely understand them, delivering the right offer, for the right product, through the right channel, they start to expect that level of personalisation everywhere.
Retailers like Woolworths are already demonstrating this with personalised Booster offers that engage millions of customers each week. What we are seeing is a shift from transactional earn-and-burn programmes to relational loyalty. The real question customers ask is: does this brand treat me like an individual?
In 2026, the experience of being recognised will matter just as much as the rewards themselves.
What should retailers or brands be doing now more than ever to drive signups?
The most effective way to drive signups today is delivering immediate, tangible value at the moment of enrolment. Customers respond far more strongly to something real now, a personalised offer, a price unlock or an instant discount, than to a promise of future rewards. The value exchange has to be obvious and immediate. If someone has to wait three shops to see the benefit of joining, most simply will not get that far.
A strong example is the ALH Hotels Pub+ programme, which offers new members a $10 discount off their first purchase, enough to meaningfully offset the cost of a meal or round of drinks at one of their venues. This has been highly effective at driving registrations, with the programme now surpassing one million members. Once members experience the value firsthand, retention follows naturally.
What does the next phase of AI-powered personalisation and loyalty look like?
The biggest shift is moving from segmentation to true 1:1 personalisation. Traditional loyalty programmes group customers into cohorts and push offers to those groups. AI changes that model.
With AI, brands can analyse a customer’s purchase history, behaviour and preferences in real time and generate offers that are genuinely individual. Leading global examples are Carrefour and Tesco, both of which offer members completely personalised challenge offers, multi-step continuity offers where the product, reward and spend threshold are all tailored to the individual.
The next phase of loyalty is the end of segmentation as the primary tool. Every customer becomes a category of one, and AI is what makes that possible at scale.
Brendan Woodward, Senior Manager – Business Development & Partnerships, Transurban
For customers in 2026, what’s the most important part of loyalty?
For customers in 2026, the single most important part of loyalty is relevance delivered through genuine value. Loyalty programs no longer earn engagement simply by existing – they earn it by consistently delivering offers that feel personally meaningful, tempting, and worth the customer’s time.
In 2026, loyalty is relevance. If an offer isn’t genuinely valuable and personally relevant, customers will not only ignore it, they will tune out the entire program.
Modern customers are not loyal to brands in the traditional sense; they are loyal to value. They will engage with offers that clearly benefit them, often regardless of brand affinity, and disengage just as quickly when that value disappears. Convenience alone is not loyalty – if a customer was going to transact anyway, a poorly‑designed reward simply clips margin without influencing behaviour.
Customers are not as loyal to brands anymore. They are loyal to value.
Relevance also underpins trust. Customers are acutely aware of how much data businesses hold about them, and irrelevant offers actively damage credibility. When a program that claims to ‘know’ a customer repeatedly gets it wrong, customers begin to question not just the program, but the brands and partners associated with it. Irrelevant offers erode trust across the entire loyalty ecosystem.
Finally, loyalty in 2026 must work for all participants. In coalition and partner‑driven models, offers must generate ROI for funders while remaining genuinely attractive to members. If that balance is not achieved, programs either lose members through disengagement or lose partners through poor commercial outcomes.
Sustainable loyalty lives where member relevance and partner ROI intersect – miss either side and the model breaks.
What should retailers or brands be doing now more than ever to drive signups?
More than ever, retailers and brands should consider focusing on converting the customers they already have, rather than chasing audiences that have no proven engagement or intent. The biggest mistake in loyalty acquisition today is targeting the wrong segments simply because they appear large or untapped.
The biggest mistake in loyalty acquisition is chasing the wrong audience instead of converting the customers already in your orbit.
Opted‑in customers, lapsed customers, and audiences that already engage with marketing represent the highest‑probability growth opportunities. These customers require less persuasion, have demonstrated intent, and are far more likely to convert into meaningful loyalty members. In contrast, attempting to acquire people who are opted out or entirely unfamiliar with the brand often delivers volume without value.
Give me opted‑in customers over opted‑out ones, lapsed customers over unknowns, and people who open emails over people who do not – that is where loyalty actually starts.
When it comes to what truly drives signup, value remains the most powerful lever. Customers will tolerate effort, learn systems, and even overcome friction if the payoff is clear. Simplicity and exclusivity can amplify conversion, but without a compelling value proposition, they rarely succeed on their own.
Value always converts. People will go to extraordinary lengths for even modest savings.
Execution also matters. While brands often invest heavily in aesthetic experiences or ‘surprise and delight’ moments, they frequently under‑invest in making signup and redemption effortless.
Brands over‑index on glossy experiences and under‑index on frictionless execution, and that is where loyalty breaks down.
Best‑in‑class signup journeys make value obvious, remove friction, and integrate seamlessly into existing customer behaviour. When signing up feels like a natural extension of a transaction, and value is delivered immediately or clearly, loyalty becomes an easy choice, not a decision.
You are creating friction if loyalty is not easy, relevant, and valuable from day one.
What does the next phase of AI‑powered personalisation and loyalty look like?
The next phase of AI‑powered loyalty will be defined by continuous relevance at scale, not novelty. AI’s role is to ensure that offers consistently sit at the intersection of member intent and commercial ROI, evolving in real time as behaviours, preferences, and market conditions change.
The future of AI in loyalty is not more offers, it’s better offers, delivered only when they matter.
Today, many personalisation engines still get relevance wrong, relying too heavily on static segments or blunt rules. The next generation will be adaptive, learning from every interaction to refine what is shown, when it is shown, and even whether it should be shown at all. This protects customer trust while maximizing partner outcomes.
When AI gets relevance right, loyalty feels effortless; when it gets it wrong, it accelerates disengagement.
Critically, the most effective AI‑driven loyalty experiences will be largely invisible to customers. Rather than showcasing technology, they will simply make the program feel intuitive, timely, and respectful of the customer’s time.
The best AI‑powered loyalty will feel like the program just understands you.
AI will also play a central role in reducing friction, streamlining redemption journeys, predicting optimal moments to engage, and ensuring that loyalty programs remain commercially sustainable for partners over time.
AI becomes the engine that keeps loyalty relevant, continuously optimising value for members while protecting ROI for partners.
In this next phase, AI does not replace loyalty strategy; it operationalises it by turning relevance, value, and trust into something that can be delivered consistently, at scale, and over the long term.
Sarah Richardson, Advisory Board Chair, Australian Loyalty Association
For customers in 2026, what’s the most important part of loyalty?
Across this year’s Awards, it is clear loyalty in 2026 is being defined by experience, not just incentives. The leading programs are those delivering seamless, end-to-end customer journeys – across digital, in-store and partner ecosystems – while creating genuine emotional engagement and measurable commercial impact.
What does the next phase of AI-powered personalisation and loyalty look like?
The programs standing out today are those that remove friction and demonstrate value immediately. Whether through compelling launch propositions, strong partner ecosystems or personalised onboarding journeys, the focus is on making the decision to join effortlessly and the benefits instantly clear.
What is strongly emerging is the shift toward sophisticated, AI-driven personalisation at scale. The best programs are using data and technology not just to segment audiences, but to deliver truly individualised experiences, optimise engagement across multiple channels and drive directly attributable results.
Where is the future of loyalty headed?
The next phase of loyalty is being shaped by intelligent, connected ecosystems where AI, digital technology, gamification and sustainability initiatives all play a role. The programs recognised this year demonstrate how loyalty is becoming a core strategic capability, driving customer experience, brand differentiation and long-term growth.
