Airports don’t normally get to be a part of the loyalty dialog. Airways do. Lodges do. However Edmonton Worldwide Airport (YEG), a hub serving 8 million passengers a yr, determined to reframe the dialog round aviation loyalty!
They wanted a option to flip scattered retail, eating, and parking spend into repeat visits and actual income perception, not only a card that tracks purchases.
The answer was to create Edmonton Airport’s very personal loyalty program: YEGplus, the primary of its form at a Canadian airport. Now let’s discover how Antavo empowers constructing loyalty and knowledge visibility for YEG.
Already feeling impressed to start out cooking up your personal loyalty program? Discover our ready-to-use Loyalty Program Idea Worksheet!
What Is the YEGplus Loyalty Program?
YEGplus is Edmonton Worldwide Airport’s tier-based loyalty program that rewards vacationers for spend throughout the whole airport, not only a single gate or a single model.
Members earn factors after they e book parking, after they store or dine with collaborating retailers, and even after they add receipts from purchases made anyplace within the terminal.
Factors convert into free parking, present playing cards, and entries into experiential rewards, together with a $20,000 journey package deal sweepstakes open to new members via September 2026.
Why Does an Airport Loyalty Program Must Work In a different way Than an Airline Or Retail Program?
An airline program rewards a single, repeatable choice: which provider you e book with. A retail program rewards a single, repeatable behavior: which retailer you stroll into. An airport loyalty program has neither luxurious.
YEGplus can’t depend on a traveler selecting Edmonton over one other airport the best way a espresso drinker chooses Starbucks over an impartial café, since most individuals don’t choose their airport in any respect. Their itinerary does.
That modifications what this system has to reward. A retailer builds loyalty round one service provider and one buy sort.
The Problem for Edmonton Airport: Knowledge Visibility
An airport is nearer to a shopping center that additionally occurs to manage parking, safety stream, and gate entry, dozens of unrelated retailers below one roof, every with its personal until, none of them speaking to one another.
Earlier than YEGplus, a traveler might seize a espresso, pay for parking, and choose up a present at three totally different techniques that had no concept they had been the identical individual.
So the true program design problem isn’t incomes loyalty to the airport itself. It’s stitching collectively spend the airport already owns however by no means used to see, then giving vacationers a motive to interact between the few occasions a yr they really go via the gates.
How Does YEGplus Make Invisible Airport Spend Seen?
For YEGplus, the technical structure facilities on Antavo performing because the core loyalty engine, connecting to a specialised ecosystem of distributors for receipt scanning, parking, and buyer knowledge.
A espresso at Starbucks, a sandwich at Tim Hortons, a parking reservation: every will get captured via Antavo’s connection to Veryfi and Chauntry, then rolled into one member profile, as a substitute of vanishing into separate service provider techniques.
What was once disconnected transactions throughout dozens of distributors turns into a single, structured feed of passenger spend knowledge the airport can really act on.
How Does the Edmonton Loyalty Program Drive Habits, Not Simply Factors?
Antavo’s Challenges module turns the YEGplus loyalty program into one thing far more lively than a card that stamps purchases.
Members full totally different gamified actions, resembling scavenger hunts, pal referrals, quizzes, and video views, incomes factors even between flights after they aren’t spending a greenback.
That very same factors stability additionally unlocks the reward facet of the equation, from on a regular basis redemptions to entries into higher-value sweepstakes like the present $20,000 journey package deal, giving members a motive to chase factors nicely past the following parking low cost.
Layer within the three-tier construction (Important, Silver, Gold), and each interplay, transactional or not, is quietly nudging frequency and engagement upward.
How Does Loyalty Knowledge Gas Edmonton Airport’s Income Choices?
Capturing spend knowledge is just half the story. The opposite half is what YEG really does with it as soon as it begins flowing in.
Program directors use YEGplus to attach passenger conduct again to business planning, from the place to develop service provider partnerships to how parking and retail efficiency issue into the airport’s broader income technique.
That’s the true shift: an airport loyalty program stops being a advertising and marketing add-on and turns into a stay enter into how a whole facility is run.
From a program administrator perspective, YEGPlus give us and supply us insightful details about our passengers and this info associated to how they spend and the place they spend, what’s the complete spend and the common spend they spend with our companions, which provides us the chance to reinforce the client expertise for them when they’re on the airport. On the identical time, we leverage on that info, trying to help the aeronautical and non-aeronautical income progress.
How Antavo’s Expertise Empowers The YEGplus Airport Loyalty Program
Velocity, flexibility, and simple platform administration have been completely instrumental for YEG. All of which Antavo delivers with flying colours via its Tiers, Rewards, Workflows, and Challenges Modules.
Precisely why YEG can run one thing like the present 100-point be a part of bonus or the flight sweepstakes with out ready on a growth cycle, and why updating Challenges post-launch stays easy slightly than requiring a rebuild every time.
Antavo has been instrumental in bringing this system to life. They understood our model and storytelling. They helped us to construct a platform that’s versatile and
straightforward to handle. With challenges, we might simply launch challenges and replace them. We will replace challenges which makes this system very versatile, dynamic and really partaking.
Antavo’s direct Klaviyo integration then carries that very same agility into communication, protecting messaging tied to precise member conduct as a substitute of generic blasts.
Incessantly Requested Questions Concerning the Edmonton Worldwide Airport Loyalty Program
Why did YEG construct a proprietary loyalty program as a substitute of counting on airline loyalty schemes?
YEGplus, launched in 2026, is the primary loyalty program of its form at a Canadian airport, a helpful case examine for any model weighing a proprietary program. Proudly owning this system instantly gave YEG management of its personal passenger knowledge, unifying parking, retail, and eating spend into one profile to drive repeat engagement and feed business technique.
What incomes mechanics make an airport loyalty program like YEGplus efficient?
YEGplus pairs transactional incomes (parking bookings, receipt uploads) with non-transactional Challenges like referrals, quizzes, and scavenger hunts. For entrepreneurs, the combination is the takeaway: spend-based incomes alone can’t maintain engagement between rare visits, so gamified actions preserve the account lively and accumulating knowledge even when a member isn’t buying.
How does reward design must differ for an airport loyalty program versus a retail one?
A retailer’s rewards revolve round one product catalog. An airport’s redemption combine has to work throughout dozens of unrelated retailers and moments, from a parking low cost to a present card to a high-value entry like YEGplus’s $20,000 journey sweepstakes, giving members causes to interact at very totally different factors of their journey, not simply at checkout.
What can each loyalty program operator study from YEGplus?
YEGplus is a helpful case for any model working throughout fragmented, low-frequency touchpoints, not simply airports. Buying malls, occasion venues, and multi-location retailers face the identical core concern: spend occurs in all places, however visibility occurs nowhere. What Antavo demonstrates right here is that the repair isn’t an even bigger rewards catalog. It’s connecting scattered transactions, gamified engagement, and income reporting into one system a enterprise can really act on.
Conclusion
YEGplus proves loyalty isn’t restricted to airways or retailers with repeat foot visitors. Any enterprise sitting on scattered, hard-to-track spend has the identical alternative: unify the info, reward greater than the transaction, and let that perception drive actual business choices. Antavo made that shift potential for a whole airport. It could possibly do the identical for you.
Antavo is the AI loyalty and incentives platform that brings collectively loyalty, promotions, and agentic AI to show clients into regulars: the shoppers who come again on their very own, purchase extra typically, and convey others with them. For greater than a decade, Antavo has powered identity-led loyalty methods for manufacturers together with SKIMS, Paul Smith, KFC, Flying Tiger Copenhagen, and Hyatt’s Inclusive Assortment. Entrepreneurs construct, change, and launch packages and promotions themselves, with out ready on engineering.
When you’re uninterested in paying to win the identical clients twice, e book a name with our consultants and see how Antavo turns them into regulars.
Zsuzsanna is a Loyalty Specialist and Licensed Loyalty Professional™ with years of expertise in digital advertising and marketing and e-commerce. Zsuzsanna is thought for having an analytic method and high-level communication abilities, serving to her ship partaking content material. In her free time, she enjoys watching Method 1 and listening to countless Taylor Swift playlists.
