In our international study of loyalty trends for 2026, 100 experts from different countries and industries rated and commented on 14 trends: value to the business and difficulty of implementation on a scale of 0 to 10, and expected lifespan on a scale of 1 to 5. The findings still stand, and these trends will shape the agenda for years to come.

The headline first: the fundamentals behind the key trends have barely changed in around 15 years. What changes is the format, the tools and the detail.

Three groups of trends

The study sorts the trends into three groups, each with an average score for value and difficulty across its trends.

• The programme as an ecosystem – 7.88 / 6.68: everything that takes a programme beyond the purchase and beyond the company, from extra revenue streams to a different kind of relationship.
• Gamification – 8.06 / 6.02: the most valuable group, and the easiest to implement.
• General trends – 7.93 / 6.65: the foundation of any modern programme. This is also where the most valuable and simplest trend sits (value 9.0, difficulty 5.75).

The programme as an ecosystem (value / difficulty)

• Engagement beyond the purchase cycle – 8.63 / 6.38. After-sales service, education, useful tools between purchases. The brand's role doesn't end at "thanks for shopping, see you again": it covers the customer's whole life with the product, right up to helping them move on from it and choose the next one.
• Partners – 8.44 / 5.75. Large coalitions have given way to exclusive, time-limited collaborations and to clubs built around lifestyle, image and shared values. The quality of partners now matters far more than how many there are.
• Unified ID and fintech – 7.88 / 7.94. Payments, wallets, instalments and member features such as receipt-free returns, priority service and member-only self-service. Simple enough in principle, but bringing these tools into the loyalty programme raises its value and helps make better use of the budget.
• Communities – 7.38 / 7.00. Engagement built around shared interests: member content, live events, limited-edition collections, communities of opinion leaders, UGC campaigns with members. Communities should largely run themselves, though not without moderation.
• Subscriptions and paid tiers – 7.06 / 6.31. Less a separate line of business than a "free base plus paid layer" model; subscriptions that guarantee members get back at least what they pay; and subscriptions as a fast track to the top tier: earn it for free by completing the required actions, or pay to skip the queue.

Gamification (value / difficulty)

• New communication formats – 8.31 / 5.94. Interactive onboarding, infographics instead of long T&Cs, one-tap notifications. Faster, clearer, simpler and more engaging. As programme members ourselves, we're not great fans of reading (we admit, 436 words into this article).
• Tiers and achievements – 8.25 / 5.94. Tier qualifying criteria are widening: not just purchases, but any customer action that serves the company's goals, from learning about its products and joining in its activities to sharing data and signing up. Alternative forms of recognition, such as badges and achievements, are gaining ground, either instead of tiers or alongside them. They shift member behaviour faster and more precisely, and they suit ecosystem programmes well, especially where each business in the ecosystem already runs its own loyalty programme.
• Alternative data collection – 8.00 / 6.31. Gamified surveys and "data for rewards" instead of tedious questionnaires, and the loyalty programme as a source of data for analytics and for automated "surveys" that need no questions at all: the answers show up in what members actually do, not in what they tell an interviewer.
• Games – 7.69 / 5.88. Spin-the-wheel, scratch cards and quizzes to increase contact frequency, support onboarding, win members back and teach them about the company's products. Games aren't only about handing out extra rewards or having fun: they're also a way to manage the reward budget, including by having members burn part of their rewards through play. Surprisingly few programmes do this.

General trends (value / difficulty)

• Rational simplification – 9.00 / 5.75. Clear earn and burn rules, quick sign-up, fewer scattered initiatives, fewer unnecessary steps, barriers and rules.
• Personalisation – 8.50 / 7.31. Beyond the familiar personalised offers, a new format is emerging: members setting up the programme themselves, from key parameters such as how they earn points or qualify for tiers to simpler choices of categories and rewards.
• Reward mix and emotion – 8.31 / 6.38. Points and discounts have long since stopped being enough, both for engaging customers properly and for building a real competitive edge. Programmes need service and non-monetary benefits, and experiences money can't buy. This approach isn't reserved for premium brands. It works in every segment: "money can't buy" simply means different things to different audiences.
• AI and machine learning – 8.00 / 8.00. Personalisation may be the first thing that comes to mind, but the most important work happens in the back office: fraud prevention, modelling, concept testing, finding weak spots in programme rules, digital twins of members for testing campaigns and projects, staff training and support for service teams (rather than replacing people with bots). An emerging area where AI meets new forms of personalisation, and one we think has great potential, is adaptive interfaces that tailor the customer journey to the member's profile, location and current initiatives. We don't count dynamic or personalised pricing here: it has nothing to do with loyalty.
• Sustainability – 5.81 / 5.81. Eco-rewards, donating points, recycling and second-life schemes. Works better for specific segments than as the core of a programme, although in rare cases it can be an alternative to the "standard" concept.

What the scores show: sometimes contradictory, but true to life and easy to explain

1. Simplification scores highest for value (9.0 out of 10), yet only 6% of experts put it in their top five trends for future funding.
2. Over the next three years, experts are putting budgets into partners, the reward mix and personalisation (63% each), AI and machine learning (56%) and unified ID (50%). The least goes to sustainability (13%), and to communications and simplification (6% each).
3. Gamification is, on average, more valuable than the other groups (8.06) and easier to implement (6.02), yet its trends make it into budgets less often: tiers and achievements 44%, data collection 38%, games 31%, communications 6%.
4. The hardest trends to implement are AI and machine learning (8.00), unified ID (7.94) and personalisation (7.31). All three need data, resources and significant changes to processes.
5. High value with difficulty below 6: simplification, partners, tiers, communications and games.
6. A hidden trend, "pull, not push": members come for the value of their own accord rather than having it pushed at them through mailings. 31% of experts already see it as a trend in its own right, and 46% as part of others.
7. Across the 44 programmes from 22 industries and 20 countries that we reviewed in the same study, the most common features are the reward mix (93%; points 84%), partners (80%), tiers (77%) and personalisation (73%). The rarest is members customising the programme themselves (14%) – for now, at least, in our view.

What to take away

1. Start with simplification: experts rate it the most valuable and one of the most achievable tasks, yet it's among the last things budgets and plans get round to.
2. For AI, unified ID and full personalisation to pay off and make sense, you need clean data (unless you're using AI precisely to sort and clean it), a mature programme and fairly high penetration. Foundations first, bells and whistles later.

Which three of the 14 trends are your main focus for budget and planned initiatives?

Trend scores for 2026: a survey of 100 international experts.