Hi everyone,

I am frequent traveller due to my job as a management consultant. I am also a huge sucker for cool new gamification approaches in loyalty programs. I love to try them out but the difficult part is learning that they exist . So I am just going to ask the community: Which present (or past) initiatives are your favorites? Where have you earned most extra miles?

My recent favorites ranked:
1. Air Baltic - Planies
2. Lufthansa - UpTrip
3. ANA - ANA Pocket

In the past also: Jet Blue - True Blue Badges, AIr Canada - Earn your Wings

I haven't really seen any cool stuff from hotels or car rental programs. Have you?

I am so much looking forward to your feedback!

I'm not quite sure what you mean, so perhaps this is off the mark. I sorely miss Hyatt's Faster Free Nights, where for 2 nights, you earned 1 free night that you could use at even their top properties. So, for instance, it was possible to stay at a Hyatt Place for less than $100 a night and redeem at a Park Hyatt that cost up and over several hundred a night. I redeemed a number of nights at Park Hyatt Vendome.

...and yet Flyertalk itself awards Badges and Titles.

I don’t follow, what is your point?

Some Flyertalk posters are interested in, and motivated by, Badges and Titles, in addition to Miles and Points.

Oh, man, the Hyatt FFN and the US Airways Grand Slams are bringing back some memories. US Airways had some really nice redemption sweet spots too. 55k R/T Envory off-peak to Europe. 80k R/T J on partner carriers to a liberally-defined North Asia region. Plus SWUs that were pretty easy to use on paid fares and awarded at mid-tier, whereas most airlines require you to hit top-tier to get SWUs.

Other honorable mentions: SPG often had promos that rivaled the Hyatt FFN. AA used to have good anniversary promos (using partners like the US Grand Slam). Hertz had a weird one where every couple of rentals you'd get a free piece of luggage. One-off thing they did with Samsonite, I think. I still have a couple of the bags in my basement somewhere. The old Hilton Conquest bonuses, circa 2001. (Those were incredibly lucrative, before much of the world had figured out hotel programs. You could turn a few Hampton Inn nights in to 6 free nights in Hawaii at their top resorts.)

Marriott always lagged in promos, but made up for it with their Elite Exclusive Offers booklets, which always had Marriott and Renaissance weekend BOGOs and a variety of other really good deals.

Modern times? Not much out there left. I occasionally run into little extras like the Hyatt free night for using 5 brands, but nothing that I chase the way we did when Milesbuzz was THE place to be on Flyertalk for all of these kinds of deals.

These also tend to blend together with actual concrete benefits, or perhaps more precisely they undermine the ability to rationally assess the value of the concrete benefit. That is, it's very difficult to dispassionately assess the real value of a given benefit when it is attached to some sort of achievement or status title. I've seen people willing to spend thousands on dollar runs to achieve an elite status level that would bring them only hundreds of dollars of benefits, but it has an elite title, and in my mind they fool themselves into thinking they're motivated by the concrete benefits rather than by the title/badge. This is the great strength of 'loyalty' programs, in my view, to businesses, they exploit our human temptation to irrationality.

That's exactly what at least number 1 in OP's ranking provides

I've seen programs with badges and titles but I'm never sure why I'd pursue them. Unless they're tied to a tangible bonus or something. (Like Hyatt's "5-brand" game, an extra free night.)

Chipotle is always trying to tempt me with badges. Like, I'm here for the burritos, not braggin' rights.

Greatest of all time for me was the SPG resort nights program... If I recall, believe it was one night at any resort for every three stays. My whole group of consultants switched between the W and Westin across the street from each other every night. I ended up with nearly 20 nights at the St Regis Kauai out of that program alone...

Greatest one ever, which pre-dated FT was the Pan Am shuttle "Book" promo which they ran several times in 1989/1990/1991. One could buy a book of 10 Pan Am shuttle tickets for something ridiculous like $399. As the shuttle operated on a "show up and fly" service, there were no blackouts or other restrictions. Each shuttle segment also earned 1500 miles, and they had a couple of other promotions including, a thousand bonus miles per same day roundtrip, as well as a 20,000 bonus if you flew 10 segments in a month, lastly there was at one point a $!00 discount on the book if you were a student.

So for $299, if one spent the entire weekend just flying back and forth, one would earn 15,000 miles "regular", 5,000 miles for same day RT's, and 20,000 for flying 10 segments on a month, a total of 40,000 miles. I should also note that IIRC one would earn Platinum status at 30,000 flown miles, so if one did this twice, one would have Platinum status. And in those days unless you were flying to Europe Platinums always got upgrades, Economy RT's to Europe cost 30,000 miles and business 40,000 miles (it might have been 50). So if you did this twice you got two RT flights to anywhere they flew in Europe and even had a good shot to get upgraded to First. Rack rate on these even at that time was $5k for J and $8k for F, and it cost a whopping $600 bucks. I remember once doing this and seeing an Indian family of 8 doing the same thing all weekend to get their tickets to India.

Another one of that era were the "Standby passes" that US carriers would sell to foreign students. They generally cost $599 and for a month gave non-US people under the age of 23 (could have been 25 IIRC) the right to fly UNLIMITED standby anywhere the airline flew in the US, All the big carriers had a version of these, Delta, American, United, TWA, Pan Am, etc. There were two things however that the airlines did not think about. One, it was an era of much less security when it came with documents, and the tickets were essentially written on the spot at the gate, so clever foreign students figured that if there were two of them, one would get the ticket written up, pass the book over to their friend before boarding (if there was space on the plane, the seat could be confirmed and BP issued 2-3 hours before the flight) and then their companion would just fly in on the next flight. Yes a bit of fraud, but I do know non US citizens who did this.

The FF aspect of this, that I suppose the airlines were myopic about was that some clever students would open a FF account with the airline, save all their boarding passes from these flights and then send them all in after the month was over and get full FF credit for all the flights that they made. So I remember a British friend of mine bragging about how he had flown, all across the US back and forth 7 times including Hawaii etc with his friend for $599 and then flew back the next year from Europe to the US again RT the next year with the miles that he earned from it. Obviously the world is a much different place now, but things like this did happen in the 80's and up to the early 90's.

We need to hear from the Pudding Guy and the Mileage Maniac .

Chipotle badges is hilarious...although now I'm hungry for a burrito...

Originally I read the thread title as "glamification" which made me wistfully recall the TWA RT IFC (Ambassador class) TATL award tickets that included a ticket on the Orient Express for 50,000 miles (plus an upgrade to IFC that I could use later on any TATL RT coach fare).

Under gamification, when I flew to Russia regularly, the cost in miles to upgrade the TATL RT (including connecting segments) from coach to "world" business class on PMNW (with KLM segments AMS-SVO and vv) was roughly equal to the number of redeemable miles I earned for the trip (and of course I also earned a ton of elite qualifying and lifetime miles on these trips). It wasn't rocket science but upgrading without guilt was nice.

The original Holiday Inn priority pass program. Earn 1 point for each stay. 60 points = one free week at any Holiday Inn worldwide. Special promo awarded 2 points per stay. Within a month, had two economy class tickets to JNB and a week long stay in Sandton. Plus, we stayed at Mala Mala and Sun City during this trip in 1982/83.
Almost worth sitting middle of last row on the stinkiest PanAm route possible.