Seasoned travelers—loyal customers of hotels, airlines, and other companies—may be the most likely to turn on those companies when hard-earned loyalty credits don’t pan out.
“In a large field experiment, we found a negative response from customers who did not reach incentivized goals, with the strongest negative reaction coming from the firm’s most loyal customers,” says Cynthia Cryder, assistant professor of marketing at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis.
Cryder and her collaborators at the University of Colorado-Boulder and Emory University conducted a large-scale field experiment at a major hotel chain with more than 95,000 existing loyalty customers.
