Akasa Elevate and the Psychology of Airline Loyalty

Airline loyalty rarely follows a straight line. A parent flying to another city for a medical need wants the earliest available seat. A business traveller booking a routine Mumbai–Delhi morning flight may choose between three similar fares and schedules—and that is where familiarity, status and flexibility quietly take over. Akasa Air’s new Elevate programme is an attempt to own the second kind of decision.

Four years after launch and six weeks after introducing Akasa Elevate, the airline is focusing less on first trial and more on the fifth, fifteenth and fiftieth booking.

A deliberately simple tier structure

Elevate has four tiers: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. Customers can reach Silver with six eligible flights or Rs 75,000 in spend; Gold with 15 flights or Rs 1.25 lakh; Platinum with 30 flights or Rs 2.5 lakh.

The “or” matters. Akasa CMO Naarayan T V says the programme is designed so people do not need a calculator to understand their path. A low-fare frequent flyer and a high-value occasional traveller get separate qualification routes.

Status before rewards

As of September 20, members can earn points but not yet redeem them. There is also no disclosed co-branded card or external partner network. That makes Elevate more of a status and experience play than a full rewards currency for now.

Yet the immediate benefits may be more emotional than a free meal. Higher tiers include discounts on meals, baggage and seats, priority services, additional baggage and, at higher levels, greater flexibility for changes and cancellations. For a corporate traveller whose meeting shifts by three hours, flexibility has clear cash value. For a family returning from holiday, extra baggage may matter more.

• Dual qualification: flight count or spend, so budget and premium travellers both progress.
• Direct-channel loading: four extra points per Rs 100 on eligible website or app bookings, similar to IndiGo’s BluChip and richer than Air India’s direct bonus.
• Experience-first logic: useful status benefits arrive before redemption, testing whether recognition can drive retention while the points economy builds.

The first-party data underneath

Only 20–30% of Indian airline bookings happen through an airline’s own channels, Akasa says. It does not want to force passengers away from OTAs. Instead, direct-booking rewards make identity clearer and connect behaviour across trips.

Akasa executive Dube offers a small example: the data can reveal how often a passenger chooses one cabin snack over another—say, cashews instead of bananas. That granularity is only useful if it changes something. The airline’s pet policy shift—raising permitted pet weight from 7 kg to 10 kg, extending certificate validity and allowing two pets in cabin—came from customer feedback. That feedback loop, not the badge, is where retention starts.

What this means for loyalty marketers

Airline loyalty is constrained. A Rs 2,000 fare difference can beat points for a leisure traveller. A corporate travel policy can remove choice. An emergency can collapse the consideration set to one available seat. Loyalty only operates when the customer has real choice.

That is still valuable territory. A frequent flyer produces signals about route, schedule, fare behaviour, baggage, seats, disruption history and service interactions. Elevate’s North Star may be “customers choosing to fly Akasa more,” as Naarayan puts it, but customer lifetime value is the outcome, not the starting objective.

Dube’s caution is worth remembering: after enough loyalty programmes, a Platinum or Titanium badge loses its magic if the service does not hold up. Loyalty is tested when a bag is delayed, when a flight changes, or when three airlines look interchangeable on an ordinary trip. Akasa already knows one customer who has flown it 152 times. Elevate is an effort to understand why that behaviour happens and make it less exceptional.

Source: ETBrandEquity.com