What if loyalty wasn't about points anymore?

Your customer has flown 50,000 miles this year, stayed 47 nights across your hotel portfolio, and generated thousands in revenue. Yet when they ask ChatGPT "where should I stay in Tokyo?", your brand doesn't appear in the recommendation. Not because the AI is biased, but because your loyalty data isn't visible to the systems making the decision. 

What AI Sees (And Doesn't See) 

When your most loyal customer asks AI for recommendations, the system treats them like a first-time customer. It can see public reviews and general property information. What it can't see is that this person is your Diamond Elite member who prefers high floors and king beds, has dietary restrictions logged in your system, or represents thousands in annual revenue. 

The 30% of guests who drive 70% of your revenue? AI may not know they exist. 

It's Not Just an AI Problem 

For most hospitality brands, loyal guest preferences are scattered across multiple systems. Room preferences sit in your PMS, communication preferences in your CRM, loyalty status in a third system, dietary restrictions in F&B, and past spa bookings in yet another database. 

A major international hotel group recently revealed they operate nearly 600 different data entry points that aren't integrated. The result is that even when repeat guests book directly with you, they end up restating information you already have somewhere in your systems. 

This fragmentation has always been expensive. It frustrates guests, creates operational inefficiency, and means missed revenue opportunities. But there's a new cost emerging. You're not just failing to deliver personalised experiences to customers who've already chosen you. You're at risk of becoming invisible to them before they even start comparing options. 

The Three-to-Five-Year Shift 

The agent-mediated future described in our recent report could change how all of this works. A guest's consumer agent knows they prefer early check-in when flying overnight from Asia, king beds on high floors, dairy-free breakfast options, and typically book spa treatments within 24 hours of arrival. Rather than repeating these preferences during booking, the consumer agent communicates directly with the hotel's operator agent in advance. 

The operator agent confirms early check-in availability, reserves an appropriate room, flags the dietary restriction for F&B systems, and tentatively holds spa availability before the guest's flight has landed. 

This isn't distant speculation. Industry technology leaders see a three-to-five-year timeline before agent-to-agent coordination becomes operational reality. As one executive put it: "You'll send your agent, and they'll send their agent, and they'll figure it out." The brands building integration capability and AI visibility now will help shape this ecosystem. The ones waiting for certainty could spend the next decade playing catch-up. 

The Shift from Points to Experience 

You might have the best loyalty programme in the industry, but if AI doesn't know about it when your customers are planning trips, you're just another option in an endless scroll. The future of loyalty isn't about richer points programmes or more elite tiers. It's about being present and personalised in the conversations where decisions happen, then having the integrated systems to deliver on that promise when customers arrive. 

Agent-mediated experiences create a different loyalty dynamic. When a hotel's operator agent has learned guest preferences across dozens of stays and consistently delivers experiences that reflect genuine understanding of evolving needs, switching hotels means losing that accumulated relationship value. This is loyalty through excellence rather than loyalty through inertia. 

Your customers are still loyal. The question is whether they can find you when they're asking AI where to stay.

What You Should Do Now 

You don't need to wait for autonomous agents to address this challenge. Here's where to begin: 

Audit your loyalty data visibility this quarter. Open ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Search for your properties as if you were a loyalty member. Does AI understand or surface your loyalty programme benefits? Does it know about your elite tiers or member perks? If AI isn't representing your loyalty programme accurately, the relationships you've built won't influence recommendations. 

Map your data landscape by mid-year. List every system holding customer preferences and loyalty information. Document which ones talk to each other (spoiler: most don't). A typical luxury hotel operates 15-30 different software systems from different vendors. Prioritise connecting PMS, CRM, and loyalty data first. As one senior leader noted: "70+ AI projects are really data projects." 

Redefine loyalty metrics now. Nights stayed and points earned don't measure experience quality or loyalty resilience. Start tracking preference delivery rate, how often repeat guests have to re-state information, and how often AI accurately represents your loyalty programme. You can't fix what you're not measuring. 

Pilot one experience within twelve months. Pick a single customer journey for your loyalty members (post-booking to arrival works well). Connect flight tracking to your PMS for proactive room assignment. Auto-adjust dining reservations if flights delay. Surface preference profiles to front desk before guests arrive. One property, one journey, one segment. Prove it, then scale. 

The transformation is underway. The brands establishing integration capability and AI visibility now will shape the next decade. The question is your organisation's role in it.