The insights team at Avolta, a global travel retail group that operates across major travel hubs and partners with many ofthe world’s most recognisable brands, came to boobook with a clear challenge.
In 2025, the company set out to improve their existing loyalty programme and profit margins. They wanted to move beyond simple discounts, towards a value-accumulation model. A system in which shoppers gradually build up value through their purchases instead of receiving one-off reductions. This shift would not only make the programme more engaging for shoppers, but subsequently also stimulate repeat purchases and cross-brand behaviour without risks of eroding margin.
A fast, accurate and straight-forward approach
For the team at Avolta, early performance indicators and internal hypotheses had previously raised as many questions as they answered. Key for Avolta was a partner they could trust to unburden them on this project, as quickly as possible.
As Pedro Manuel Gonzalez, Global head of Insights put it “This wasn’t perhaps the most complex of challenges ever but we needed timely delivery and a partner whose expertise and ownership could lighten my team’s burden. Boobook’s clear and precise output with minimal back and forth speaks volumes about their expertise and reliability.”
To progress swiftly and with confidence, our role at boobook was to provide a clear and tailored approach that identified:
- Which (mix of) loyalty currency mechanics (points, hybrid or cashback) best fit their target group and brand?
- What drivers and barriers exist for enrolling?
- What features and benefits matter most regarding travellers’ decisions to return?
- What visual and textual cues can assist marketing communication to make the programme feel both generous and effortless to travellers?
Phased research to evaluate, refine and consolidate loyalty mechanic concepts
We started the project with a qualitative phase, conducting focus groups among Spanish and British duty-free shoppers. These sessions deep-dived reactions to Avolta’s different loyalty mechanics as well as perceived clarity, motivations and barriers for joining and repeat purchasing in travel loyalty schemes.
Via a second and more expansive quantitative phase with 960 duty-free shoppers, we evaluated tweaked Avolta loyalty mechanics across European markets on a range of KPI’s including appeal and uniqueness. A MaxDiff and TURF analysis were used to shed light on the relative importance of benefits and define benefit combinations with the highest reach.
Moving from key recommendations to durable action
Together with the team at Avolta, we brought the qual and quant lenses together to formulate a clear strategic roadmap. This clarity enabled to refine the loyalty mechanic, expand the programme’s reach, and focus messaging on the most impactful elements.
These recommendations provided strategies to sustain post-launch momentum and encourage repeat purchases, enabling faster, more confident decision-making that benefits both travellers and the business. “The boobook team impressed us with their professionalism and seamless collaboration. Even with a relatively straightforward project, they delivered clear insights that were both detailed and sharply focused, no easy feat. I felt confident and supported throughout." Pedro Manual Gonzalez, Global head of Insights at Avolta
Three learnings for travel retail loyalty
- Value + clarity = win. Perceived generosity only drives behaviour when the rules are simple, transparent and feel fair at a glance.
- Make the breadth tangible. Indicate where value can be earned and redeemed, and anchor the promise with a few recognisable partner examples to nudge travellers to explore across categories.
- Privileges create stickiness. Beyond price incentives, well-chosen privileges turn a programme from a discount engine into a status engine.
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