Best Practise Profile:

IBERIA PLUS: A Generous Strategy for Long-term Loyalty

by Javier Deleito, Subdirector Loyalty, Iberia

Iberia Plus was born in September 1991 as the first global Frequent Flyer Program in Europe. The size of Iberia matched with the vision of Iberia’s executives enabled us to establish an FFP without borders, offering the same program regardless of the country of residence of our clients. Iberia Plus also has some major differences with other programs:

• Our currency is points instead of miles.

• We do not award points to clients for distances flown, but rather for geographical zones, cabin, and reservation class. We use the same concepts for redemption.

• Our table of points is simple to understand and to remember for our clients.

• Iberia Plus is designed as a medium to long-term program. We do not see the FFP program as a revenue-generating tool, but as Iberia’s best client database, providing Iberia with information concerning high revenue tickets and frequent travellers.

• Iberia Plus is not only focused on the accrual of points for the redemption of free tickets, but also on the other side, offering the most generous program in terms of space available for redemption tickets, with no cost, no blackout days, and almost no need to make a reservation in advance. We work to award the client in terms of ability to redeem Iberia tickets.

Iberia Plus has a crucial strategy to monitor the space available for redemption and thereby maintain availability as high as possible for the clients, ensuring that they choose Iberia as the first and best option to redeem the points accrued in Iberia Plus, whether those points were accrued flying on Iberia or through Iberia Plus partners. We believe that this is where the loyalty factor lies!

To do this properly, we adjust the number of points that clients are able to collect with partners. This is not an easy task. Bear in mind that as a Loyalty program, Iberia Plus must provide clients with the best opportunities to accrue points. We have meetings with no less than ten companies per month willing to participate as partners of Iberia Plus. If we want to keep our redemption policy healthy and generous, we cannot afford to be greedy, collecting points (even profitable points) with more and more partners would be working for the short-run. However, we are always thinking medium to long-term, which is not easy to do nowadays.

We already have more than 30 partners, and of course we know the potential that Iberia Plus has to sell points to companies that would join Iberia Pus as partners and therefore the revenue that we are not collecting.

After 13 years of not being greedy, we are very sure that this policy has worked very well for us. In the near future, Iberia Plus will be more open for the introduction of some more selected partners to issue Iberia Plus points and we will always adapt the number of points generated by partners with the capacity the company is able to offer our clients for redemption tickets.

Internally in Iberia, we have a very close relationship with the Revenue Management Department, which fully understands the importance of the redemption strategy for Iberia Plus and for Iberia’s best clients. These clients are the ones who purchase Business Class tickets that the Revenue Management Department and the sales people have targeted.

Internally in Iberia, we say that Iberia Plus is the number 1 client of the company. In fact, there is no single company that purchases as many tickets or gives Iberia so much revenue as Iberia Plus, since Iberia Plus pays Iberia for the redemption tickets at a fair and reasonable price. This policy has been working to ensure enough seats are always available for our clients to redeem seats on every flight. This is what our clients tell us and therefore we’ll keep listening to them, because we want to keep them as our best asset - “our clients deserve it“.

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