Scandic Hotels has this week announced it has recruited 1.5 million members for its loyalty programme Friends.
Henrik Adinger, who became the 1.5 millionth member when he was checking into the Scandic Kungens Kurva in Stockholm, received a bunch of flowers and will also get to spend a free night in a mobile Scandic To Go hotel room (a service that will deliver a hotel room to wherever a guest may choose).
The chain says that the programme, which was launched in 2008, is "by far the most beneficial and popular loyalty programme in the industry" in the Nordics.
We thought this would be a good time to look at other hotel loyalty programmes around the world. It is hard to compare like with like, especially as companies like Starwood and Wyndham only announce figures for active members of their programmes, but that aside, it is interesting to see how many million members each has.
In order to get a fairer comparison, we also looked at the total number of rooms that each chain has, shown by the line on the following chart. Typically, it seems that hotel chains have around 40 to 60 loyalty members for each of the rooms in their worldwide estate. Notable exceptions to this are InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), which has around 120, and Wyndham, which has around 12.
Loyalty programmes account for huge proportions of hotel chain business. For some chains, loyalty members account for more than 50% of all room nights. No wonder chains are doing more than ever to encourage travellers to sign up to their programmes, by offering things like free WiFi or access to mobile smart room keys only to loyalty members.
