The last one that was sort of a loyalty program to me - although it also had great rewards - was SPG.

The "loyalty" part, for me, was that I knew they just took care of Platinums. Even when the hotel was full and they couldn't give you a suite, they still made things go right. And many, many times threw in unpublished extras like free drinks, welcome gifts that weren't required, etc. It felt like actual hospitality.

Marriott, by contrast, is the most pure-rewards program there is - very transactional, impersonal, and at best by-the-book in terms of what you receive. (At worst, you have to claw and fight for what the published benefits are.) The one element of SPG they retained is Ambassador for the very, very top tier, which is better than nothing, but even reading on FT it seems like a far cry from how beloved the Ambassadors were in SPG.

I haven't felt like any airline program rewarded loyalty since the early 00's. I was mid- to high-tier on AA, US, and UA in different years - it was about then that zero-hold direct phone numbers for elites started disappearing, and things like the AA Platinum Desk at airports started to go away. The customer service side of the airline experience has steadily gotten worse for 25 years now - and the programs are now all exclusively transactional and formula-based. I no longer have any loyalty to any carrier - I just compute what the benefits and miles are worth to me and factor it into my buying decision.