UK drowning in generic points, poorly timed discounts and irrelevant rewards
Britain increasingly risks falling behind markets where loyalty is becoming more immediate and useful while the Middle East and Latin America are racing ahead with personalisation and relevant offers.
This is the claim from travel and rewards platform Dragonpass in their inaugural Comfort Index.
The contrast with faster-moving loyalty markets is becoming harder to ignore says the report. In the Middle East, the loyalty market is forecast to grow at 13.8% CAGR between 2025 and 2029, reaching $5.49bn, with growth shaped by AI-led personalisation, credit-card loyalty and integrated rewards.
MEA consumers are also showing a clear appetite for more immediate mechanics, with 53% especially enthusiastic about instant digital rewards.
Latin America tells a similar story of loyalty becoming more immediate, mobile and value-led. The region’s loyalty market is expected to grow by 17.0% in 2025 to reach $5.09bn, while Euromonitor data shows 58.7% of Latin Americans participate in loyalty programmes to receive discounts or offers and 46.1% do so to receive free products. These markets suggest loyalty is becoming more responsive, contextual and immediately useful elsewhere, while Britain’s better-established data economy still appears to be struggling to turn customer knowledge into benefits that feel relevant when people actually need them.
Britain’s loyalty problem, says Dragonpass, looks less like a lack of data and more like a failure to turn that data into relevance:
- 50% of Brits, or 24.43 million people, say most loyalty schemes feel outdated and out of touch with the pressures of everyday life.
- 43% of Brits, or 19.79 million people, say they have stayed loyal to brands or providers, only to find the perks and support offered felt irrelevant when they genuinely needed help.
- 69% of Brits, or 33.11 million people, say the brands set to win long-term loyalty are those reducing stress, friction and inconvenience across everyday life.
The findings suggest British consumers have already given brands years of behavioural signals, transaction history and loyalty tenure. What they are questioning now is why that knowledge so rarely comes back as something useful. With 63% or 30.70 million people saying they are most loyal to organisations that make life easier, more comfortable and less inconvenient, the next loyalty battleground may not be who has the most data, but who can turn it into practical comfort.
This is particularly relevant for long-term service providers says Andrew Harrison-Chinn, CMO at Dragonpass. Banks hold some of the deepest consumer relationships, with 62% of people staying with their main bank for more than ten years. Yet banks or card providers are also one of the sectors where consumers most want greater comfort, convenience or support, with 76% placing them in their top five.