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Every quarter, like clockwork, management teams host their earnings calls and talk up their loyalty numbers. Most recently, we heard that Marriott added 75 million Bonvoy members in two years, bringing its total to 271 million. Hilton crossed 243 million. Booking Holdings grew its direct channel from the low-50s to the mid-60s as a share of room nights.
Executives beam, analysts nod along — and no one asks the one question that actually matters: Is any of this making it cheaper to acquire the next customer?
To test that, I pulled three years of SEC filings from 13 companies in four sectors — OTAs, hotels, airlines, and cruises.
The premise of every loyalty program is simple: Companies spend money to acquire a customer, offer points or status to bring them back, and over time, each subsequent booking should cost less to acquire than the first. Marketing spend as a share of revenue should go down as loyalty goes up — that’s the deal.
The data I pulled says it isn't working the way the industry thinks it is.
Take Booking Holdings, the best case. Its marketing ratio improved over three years, falling from 35% to 30% of revenue. But the improvement came because revenue grew 57%, not because marketing got more efficient. Booking still spent $2.2 billion more on marketing in 2025 than in 2022. The direct channel grew, the Genius tiers expanded, the app-first push worked, and Booking still wrote a check for $8.19 billion in marketing last year. Direct-channel growth didn’t replace paid acquisition — it ran alongside it.
Meanwhile, Expedia launched One Key in 2023, and its sales and marketing ratio ticked up, remaining above 55%.
Cruise lines are spending more on marketing despite growing repeat-guest programs.
Hotels are the most interesting case, and not in a good way. Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt have a combined 577 million loyalty members and can’t tell you what those programs cost. The franchise model buries marketing expenses inside billions in reimbursed owner costs — $19 billion in pass-through revenue at Marriott alone.
The cost of maintaining those members is invisible. That's not an accident, it's an accounting feature that prevents anyone from testing whether loyalty is actually working.
The company with the lowest marketing dependency in travel is Airbnb — 21% and declining — and it has no loyalty program. Maybe Airbnb shouldn’t launch one after all — even though everybody, including us, has been asking Brian Chesky for one for years.
So who figured this out? Airlines. And they did something the rest of the travel industry can’t replicate.
Delta received $8.2 billion from American Express last year. Southwest got $2.6 billion from Chase. Airlines turned their loyalty programs into profit centers by selling miles to banks at massive margins, because an empty seat is a near-zero-cost product that expires the moment the door closes. The credit card company does the customer acquisition work. That's why airline selling expenses are 3-4% of revenue — the lowest in travel — while OTAs sit at 30-55% and cruises at 12-17%.
Hotels can’t fully do this because they don’t own most of their rooms — franchise owners do. And those owners don’t love their inventory being filled with points redemptions that displace full-rate bookings. The unit economics of giving away a room are worse than giving away a seat.
OTAs can’t do it at all because they don’t own any inventory.
So, that’s the hierarchy. Airlines have perishable inventory and full ownership, so loyalty becomes revenue. Hotels have real-cost inventory and fractured ownership, so loyalty is a modest side deal. OTAs have no inventory at all, so loyalty is pure expense with no structural path to making it pay for itself.
The industry has confused enrolling customers with retaining them. A loyalty member who books through your app because you offered them a 10% discount is not a loyal customer. The moment someone else offers a better deal (or the moment an AI agent comparison-shops on their behalf), the member count means nothing.
The only number that matters is whether acquiring the next booking is getting cheaper or more expensive. And yet, the travel industry talks about loyalty the way it talks about sustainability — constantly, earnestly, and with very little evidence that the talking has changed anything.
Until a CEO stands up on an earnings call and says their marketing spend went down because their loyalty program made it unnecessary, those member counts are just bigger numbers to celebrate next quarter.
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SKIFT PODCAST NETWORK
Welcome to Travel Explained, a new social video series from Skift breaking down the business, trends, and forces shaping the travel industry in a clear and accessible way.
In our first video, Skift Airlines Editor Gordon Smith explains the economics of a commercial flight by looking at a route from Boston to Paris.
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CHART OF THE WEEK
Source: Skift Research, Gen Z and millennials survey, December 2025.
Based on a sample of 965 U.S. respondents (Gen Z n = 278, millennials n = 687) who traveled at least once in the past year.
A mix of passion for travel, fluency in technology, and comfort with remote tools has fueled interest in the digital nomad lifestyle. In fact, half of Gen Z and millennials say they’ve lived and worked away from home for more than a month, and more than one-third are doing so today.
The reality, however, is more complicated. Among those who tried and stopped, the main barriers were cost, visa logistics, and difficulty working effectively from remote locations. While many say they would like to return to the lifestyle, affordability pressures, tighter visa regimes, and return-to-office mandates continue to limit participation. Notably, 22% cite employer requirements as the reason they stopped, with Gen Z more affected than millennials.
The early optimism around long-term remote work abroad is fading, suggesting that by 2030, a much smaller fraction of young travelers will be digital nomads.
