The Most Innovative Loyalty Reward System

It was late at night when I checked into this Marriott Courtyard hotel in Seattle, WA. As a Marriott loyalty club member, I am offer points or an amenity when I check in. I usually choose points. So I was surprised when the front desk clerk reached back and pulled out this, a mechanical toy pond with plastic baby ducks swimming around it.

"What's that?" I asked.

"It's how we award loyalty points," answered the clerk. "You pick up one of the swimming ducks and on the bottom of the duck is the number of loyalty points you've won. Some ducks have more, some ducks have less."

So I let the ducks swim around a bit and picked one. It was for 1,000 points, 500 more than what I would have earned if they had just given me the normal allocation.

So a couple of cool customer experience things are happening here. First, the hotel employees were empowered to do something like this. Second, it is a very creative way to allocate loyalty points, which I don't think any "professional" experience designer would have ever thought of. I also learned that this wasn't their only loyalty point game. They also had a game that used playing cards. All-in-all, well done!

No Phone Zone at Masters

Similar to the cruise ship Paradise which I wrote about in our book Creating Do-It-Yourself Customers, where smoking was banned on the ship with severe penalties if you did smoke, the 2012 Masters golf tournament has a similar policy. Cell phones are banned from the Masters, and if you are caught with one then you are asked to leave and banned from the Masters as well (see WSJ 4/6/12). Here we have the use of an incentive (specifically, punishment) to influence customer performance. What's also interesting about this policy is that it has forced spectators to revert back to other methods to keep in touch with their friends and family at the Masters, such as having a plan (Vision:Plan).