Somebody Else Is Getting Credit for the Trip You Paid For
What I overheard in a hotel pool in Lake Como, and why we built Gateway to hand the credit back.
6 min read • by Adam Morvitz
Last summer I was lying poolside on Lake Como, keeping to myself, when...
I heard two couples a few feet away bragging that they had gotten there for free.
Somebody else in the pool did what people always do, which is ask how. Chase points? Amex points? And both couples said no, we used this app. They spent the next ten minutes pitching point.me to a total stranger in the water, and I got to introduce myself as an employee. I waited a few cocktails before I mentioned I was the CEO.
I love that story. If you run a loyalty program, this should bother you.
You funded that trip. Somebody else got the credit and the memory.
Those couples flew in business class on points that a bank issued them. Maybe they combined them with miles they earned from your partner ecosystem, or maybe they forgot they had those miles and over-transferred. The bank funded the flight and hotel stay, carried the liability, and ran the program that made the whole thing possible. When the moment arrived that the currency finally proved it was worth something, when a person got to sit in a pool in Italy and brag about it to a stranger, the name that came out of their mouth was ours.
What can we learn from that? The single best opportunity for financial institutions and their loyalty partners to provide outsized value is being credited to somebody else.
Most of you think the award travel box is checked.
You have a rewards program. Customers earn on it. There is a portal, or there is a roadmap for one. The line item is funded, the vendor is signed, and internally this reads as solved.
It is not solved. There are over $300B worth of points in circulation today, more than at any point in history. More people are holding a balance, and the balances they hold are the largest they have ever been. Yet, none of that is showing up as redemption behavior or showing up as front of wallet. People are earning more than ever and they are still not turning it into the trips they imagined when they signed up.
Meanwhile your customer has never had more options. Roughly 30 million US cardholders say they are likely to change their primary card within the year. The single biggest reason they move is better rewards. What rewards are deemed the most valuable? Travel is the number one reason that customers sign up for a credit card, spend on it to fund a trip, and the one that keeps them loyal.
Why it’s broken, and why we’re uniquely positioned to fix it.
We have watched tens of millions of customers with access to the point.me platform and we know where the leakage comes from. When people try to use their points through our consumer business, we know exactly where they stop. They stop because the experience is disconnected and fragmented. Balances live in one place, travel inventory in another, transfer rules in a third, and the customer is quietly expected to navigate between all of them.
No bank can fix that alone, because it does not hold the inventory. No airline or hotel program can fix it alone, because it is not present in the app where the decision gets made. Building that takes 3+ years, a commercial team, an infrastructure team, and an enormous amount of money spent learning things other people already know.
That is exactly what Gateway is.
We took the connectivity and made it something you can turn on in less than 60 days: award search, live inventory, transfers, booking and servicing, running inside your own app under your own brand across flights, hotels and experiences. American Express has been live on our technology since 2024. We support more than 250 carriers and loyalty programs.
We are launching with partners on both sides of the loyalty ecosystem, because that is the only way this works. On the financial side, Revolut, serving more than 80 million customers, and B2Bpay, Zenith Payments' business payments and loyalty platform. On the loyalty side, Flying Blue, the loyalty program of Air France-KLM Group.
We would like to give the credit back.
We have spent years being the name people say at the pool. We are grateful for it, and we built a real business on it, but it shouldn't be ours alone.
That moment belongs to whoever issued the currency. It should be your name in that conversation, your app open on the deck chair, your card the one they reach for next time, because you were the one who made the trip happen. We know how to build that moment. We want to hand you the keys.
Your customers already told you what they wanted when they signed up. Let us go deliver on that promise.
