Collecting Miles to Earn Elite Status in Your Marriage?

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A just-released beta version of a new app is helping couples earn loyalty rewards to keep partners engaged in much the same manner that airlines and hotels have done for years.

Loyalty is the key to any good relationship. Even a somewhat dysfunctional consumer relationship has a chance to survive given the right inducements to encourage loyalty.

An app released on Valentine’s Day this year, intends to encourage couples to maintain the same sort of excitement and close relationships with each other that they have with their preferred airlines, hotel chains and car rental companies. Duety, which is now live in Brazil, allows users to earn loyalty rewards for doing nice things for their significant others. The app’s simple concept has made Duety a fast hit, and that popularity has developers ready to go global.

“The basic concept of Duety is the game of ‘brownie-points’ as they call it in the United States – here in Colombia we call it Matripuntos,” developer Oriana Castro Ramirez told The Bogota Post this week. “It’s basically ‘marriage miles,’ or points you give to each other for good things you have done for each other. Say you wait outside the changing room for an hour for your wife – you get points! You attend her family reunion – more points! It’s the small things you do for your partner that creates value with them. In the future there will be an option to redeem these points. Duety keeps track of only the positive things of the relationship – the only way to take points off is to redeem them.”

Castro Ramirez says that users will soon be able to redeem the reward miles earned in the app for real world premiums through partnerships with sponsors. This may mean that in the near future, it will be highly likely that the next time a spouse makes breakfast in bed for a special occasion, it won’t be quite as selfless an act as it seems.

Castro Ramirez insists, however, that rather than earning the perks of elite status, the goal of Duety is to “basically keep up a journal of the relationship” and along the way couples might just find themselves growing closer – without any risk of devaluation.