Frequent Skier Cards: Driver of Incremental Sales or Confusing Bonus System?
Gregg Blanchard /
Back in Utah, one of my favorite casual restaurants was Cafe Rio. Besides a crazy tasty sweet pork burrito (enchilada style, black beans, mild sauce), they had a simple frequent-customer rewards system: buy 10 meals, get one free.
It was hard to not understand how it worked. If your little card had a punch on every number 1-10, you could use it for a free meal (at which point the entire crew would shout “free meal” to prove your awesomeness to the entire restaurant), a desire that determined our choice of eatery more than once. To contrast, I have a ton of Subway points I’ve never used simply because I have no idea how they accumulate or when they actually provide me any value.
When I look around at many resorts frequent skier cards, like my Subway experience, I get lost in a long list of rules, up front prices, days valid, and systems. Let’s take a look.
Pay Now, Discount Later
Basic Rules: Buy the card for $XX.XX, get XX% off (or $XX discount) every time you buy a ticket.
Example: Sunapee
Pay Now, Increasing Discount Later
Basic Rules: Buy the card for $XX.XX, get an increasing XX% off (or $XX discount) each additional time you buy a ticket.
Example: Okemo
Pay Now for “Free” Ticket, Discount Later
Basic Rules: Buy the card for $XX.XX, get a “free” ticket, plus a XX% off (or $XX discount) each time you buy a ticket.
Example: Sunday River
Pay Now forTicket, Discount + Free Days Later
Basic Rules: Buy the card for $XX.XX, get XX% off (or $XX discount) each time you buy a ticket and ski for free on certain dates.
Example: Big Sky
My Question
I really like the idea of getting people to put some some money into it early and commit, but I’m wondering why “ski X days, get 1 free” is so rare and “pay XX now for $XX off one day and $XX off another day…” is so common? Why every person that comes to your ticket window, just like Cafe Rio, isn’t handed a frequent skier card?
The simplicity of other industries systems seems to let you tweak the motivation, like the classic car-wash story, without adding another layer of complexity:
“Not long ago, in a major metropolitan area, two consumer researchers named Joseph Nunes and Xavier Drèz conducted a customer loyalty experiment at a local car wash.
On two consecutive Saturdays, they gave out a total of 300 customer loyalty cards. Half of those required 8 purchases to earn a free car wash. The other half required 10, but instead of requiring the full 10, the car wash gave 2 car wash head-start as a free bonus.
This means, in both scenarios, customers still needed to make 8 additional purchases before they could redeem a free car wash. The only difference was varying degrees of completeness. On one hand, customers were 0% complete, and on the other, they were 20% complete.
Now the question is, would this “artificial” progress increase customer loyalty?
During the next 9 months, 28 out of 150 people without a head-start earned a free car wash, but 51 out of 150 people with the head-start earned a free car wash. That’s an increase of 82%.”
Fill me in here. Am I missing something in the data or are we hurting performance by making our frequent skier cards a little too complicated?