This week an email arrived from Marriott Bonvoy with my 2025 Year in Review. I opened it on my phone in a taxi, read it twice, and then forwarded it to half the team. If you run a loyalty programme in hospitality, this is the email you should be studying.
What it told me
Platinum Elite status. Fifty-four nights stayed. Seven cities. Points earned from hotel stays, and points earned from partners, including Emirates Skywards, which matters to someone who lives in Dubai and spends a lot of time in the air.
None of that is information I did not have. I could have found all of it in the app. But I never would have gone looking, and that is the point. The recap did the looking for me, turned a year of transactions into a story, and made me feel, briefly, like a person the brand had noticed rather than a profile in a database.
It also quietly reminded me how close I was to the next tier, and what the partner earning had contributed. Which is to say it did the marketing job without looking like marketing.
Why hotels are so good at this
Hotel loyalty is complicated. Tiers, nights, elite night credits, partner earn, status matches, award charts. I came into Bonvoy through a status match from Hilton, which is itself a mechanism most restaurant operators would find bewildering. And yet the experience of being a member is simple. You stay, you earn, you get looked after a bit better each year, and once a year someone sends you a note that says: here is what you did, here is what it got you.
The complexity is all on their side of the counter. That is the discipline I admire most. The programme can be as sophisticated as the business needs, as long as the guest only ever sees the simple version.
Hotels have also had decades of practice, enormous data sets, and a product where the guest hands over their identity at check-in whether they like it or not. Restaurants have none of those advantages. But the lesson transfers.
What restaurants should copy
Most restaurant programmes we see communicate in two modes: the transactional receipt (“you earned 120 points”) and the promotional blast (“two for one this Thursday”). Almost nobody does the annual recap. Which is odd, because the data is sitting right there.
Imagine a member of a restaurant group getting an email in the first week of December that says: you visited us 23 times this year, across four of our restaurants, your most-ordered dish was the sea bass, you earned enough to cover three dinners, and your favourite table was by the window at the Manchester site. Thank you. Here is something for January.
That is not hard to build. The visit count, the venue mix and the top dish are all in the POS and membership data. The hardest part is deciding to do it, and writing copy that sounds like a person wrote it.
How to do it this month
- Pick five data points per member: visits, venues, favourite dish or drink, points or cashback earned, and one small fact that will make them smile.
- Only send it to members with enough history to make it meaningful. A recap of two visits is awkward for everyone.
- End with a reason to come back in the quiet weeks of January. That is the commercial payoff.
- Write it in your brand’s voice, not your CRM platform’s default template.
Hospitality is built on remembering people. The best maître d’ remembers your name and your usual. The best loyalty programme does the same at scale, once a year, in an email that takes thirty seconds to read. Marriott have just shown us the template. There is still time to send one before the year ends.
If any of this is relevant to your estate, get in touch. There is more writing here, and the studio behind the work is TheLoyaltyCo.