Skift Take
The move for Virgin's most loyal customers will be a hard one. But in return they get an airline that will take them so many more places.
Editor's Note: Skift's Business Traveler newsletter is now the Business of Loyalty newsletter.
In this weekly missive, we'll bring you the same insight into what matters most to the people who travel for a living, but now with an added focus on how airlines, hotels, and credit card programs battle for their attention and their business — a points geek with a Ph.D. of sorts.
While we are still looking at how these moves impact the consumer, the focus is on what the industry is doing to win their loyalty. The newsletter is being written by Grant Martin, who you've come to know as the author of our Business Traveler newsletter over the last three years. He'll be able to take advantage of contributions from Skift editors including Brian Sumers (airlines) and Deanna Ting (hotels) in order to better explain what's happening with loyalty right now. We hope you'll stick with it, and we promise to never devalue your reading experience.
Amidst the slow wind-down of Virgin America's marketing team over the last few months, facets of Elevate, the airline's loyalty program, have been calving like icebergs breaking off the Antarctic ice sheet.
In April, the joint Alaska-Virgin America published a schedule for the c
