Deliver added value and capture the next generation of travellers, fuelling future growth.
As Flight Centre Travel Group explored future growth opportunities and trends in consumer behaviour, it quickly recognised loyalty as a way to attract the next generation of travellers and deepen relationships with existing ones.
The desire for value and personalised experiences meant travellers were no longer tied to a single loyalty program as they had been in the past. They also craved more choice in how they could earn and use their rewards. This was a clear advantage for Flight Centre Travel Group, which offers flights, hotels, cruises, travel insurance, tours, and more.
Flight Centre Travel Group sought to create a loyalty program distinct from traditional status-driven models, opting instead to offer free and paid memberships to better serve customer preferences. It needed a solution to manage the complexity of orchestrating this program and giving customers the unique flexibility to earn and redeem points across a vast travel ecosystem.
The travel group also wanted to build on previous enhancements to data management and personalisation to strengthen loyalty at every customer touchpoint, from researching trips online to speaking with a Flight Centre Travel Expert.
In entering an established space, we had to make bold decisions and leverage our strengths to provide customers with greater choice and value.
Clinton HearneExecutive General Manager, Customer Loyalty, Flight Centre Travel Group
Loyalty Management helps Flight Centre Travel Group build and scale a flexible, personalised loyalty program.
Flight Centre Travel Group has now launched its World360 Rewards loyalty program, allowing members to earn and redeem points on flights, cruises, hotels, and tours across Flight Centre, Cruiseabout, and Travel Associates.
Salesforce Loyalty Management centralises program management, handling the complexity and intricate rules involved in facilitating partner promotions, points boosters, and members’ ability to stack or rollover points from other travel or credit card companies. In practice, this means a customer can seamlessly upgrade from a free to paid World360 Rewards membership, transfer points from a partner, and redeem them for a travel deal immediately—all without creating excessive manual effort.
Flight Centre is also using Loyalty Management to deliver a personalised rewards experience. The travel group has built gamification into its World360 Rewards app, awarding points for answering questions about travel preferences, such as whether members prefer unwinding at a wellness retreat or diving among sea life. Data flows directly into Data 360, allowing Flight Centre to activate insights immediately to drive personalisation across its websites and apps.
Within months of launching its loyalty program, Flight Centre has seen up to 44% higher average booking value for members compared to non-members. It is now working to establish a broader view of its loyalty return and identify levers to increase booking frequency and value.
Loyalty Management simplifies the complicated aspects of our program, enabling us to provide a seamless loyalty experience at scale.
Clinton HearneExecutive General Manager, Customer Loyalty, Flight Centre Travel Group
Data 360 unifies data to drive personalisation at scale.
To provide customers with personalised experiences—including tailored promotions and rewards—Flight Centre Travel Group has turned to Data 360 to create a single, actionable view of the customer across its entire leisure portfolio—including Flight Centre, Travel Associates, Cruiseabout, and World360 Rewards.
Ingesting retail and online transaction data, website visits, and app interactions into Data 360, Flight Centre Travel Group can see where customers have been, where they want to go next, and how they want to get there.
These insights are not only used for marketing, but flow through to Agentforce Sales and Agentforce Service to empower Flight Centre brand’s Travel Experts with a unified customer view. Soon, Travel Experts will also be able to see loyalty data in the CRM and harness AI to suggest next best offers to customers based on their histories and points balances.
Flight Centre brand is now rebuilding its Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) segmentation model using Calculated Insights within Data 360. Previously, this data was stored in its data lake, requiring data engineering support to access it. Soon marketers will be able to use visual mapping to create segments that feed directly back into Agentforce Marketing, saving time and giving them greater control.
Agentforce Marketing and Personalisation drive acquisition and conversion.
With this unified data foundation in place, Flight Centre Travel Group is poised to completely personalise the customer experience—building on a journey that began with the consolidation of its marketing stack.
Deploying Agentforce Marketing, Flight Centre halved the number of platforms used by the marketing team and reduced martech spend by 65%. The marketing team also adopted a new global structure, allowing previously siloed teams to work more collaboratively and leverage best practices across regions. Time spent curating weekly emails and journeys was reduced by 70% while overall team productivity increased by 71%.
The team’s focus on personalising the customer experience began with tailoring website and email experiences. For example, by using data to trigger relevant pop-ups—such as inviting people to win holidays tailored to their browsing history—Flight Centre brand increased new subscribers by 60% in a matter of weeks.
Flight Centre Travel Group has since rolled Personalisation out across Flight Centre brand, Cruiseabout, and Travel Associates and is tailoring every aspect of digital engagement. This extends to delivering personalised recommendations within its e-commerce flow. For example, those purchasing flights are presented with the option to choose a flight and hotel package with three different hotels offered based on the customer’s affinities. This allows Flight Centre to upsell in the moment and meet more of their customers’ travel needs.
These personalised offers and campaigns have paid dividends with results for Flight Centre brand alone, including:
Agentforce Marketing has helped us take control of our channels, so we can meet specific business needs and deliver immediate value.
Megan HendersonGlobal Head of Marketing Flight Centre, Flight Centre Travel Group
With sales, marketing, and support all on one platform, Flight Centre brand can work more efficiently to personalise the customer experience and build customer loyalty into every touchpoint. Salesforce also underpins Flight Centre's new World360 Rewards program, helping to automate complex earn-and-redeem rules across the leisure portfolio to deliver instant value to members.
Consolidating Flight Centre onto a single technology stack has revolutionised how the global team operates. By applying an "80/20 rule"—where 80% of customer journey content is standardised globally and 20% is tailored for local nuance—the team can scale best practices while maintaining brand relevance.
With Agentforce, Flight Centre can continue to transform digitally and elevate the experience of customers and employees. Future possibilities include deploying agents to serve as points hackers that help customers maximise the value of World360 rewards. Agentforce could also open up new two-way communication channels where customers can have real-time dialogues with agents directly via email or online.
With Data 360 and a single, actionable view of customers, we are fully realising the value of Salesforce as a connected ecosystem for engagement.
Luke De LandellesHead of MarTech - Leisure, Flight Centre Travel Group
Prior to launching World360 Rewards, Flight Centre Travel Group built a strong foundation to deliver personalised customer experiences at scale. This capability is the result of nearly a decade of deliberate platform investment, not a single transformation. Beginning with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement (now Agentforce Marketing) nine years ago, the team built foundational data discipline and journey orchestration at scale before layering in four years of full-scale Salesforce Personalisation deployments — surfacing real-time Next Best Action across web, app, email, app push, third-party ad networks and very soon in-store touchpoints across the leisure portfolio. Most recently, the team has completed five Data 360 builds across its five leisure brands, creating a unified, real-time customer intelligence layer that connects behavioural signals, loyalty activity, and transaction history into a single actionable profile. Critically, every capability decision has been anchored in the same principle: the customer experience defines the technology requirement, not the reverse. This martech-first philosophy — embedded in a dedicated Leisure Centre of Excellence working in active partnership with Salesforce's product organisation — means Flight Centre Travel Group is consistently positioned to evaluate, adopt, and scale emerging capabilities, including Agentforce, before they reach general availability.
The technology only works if the customer experience comes first. Nine years, five brands, five continents — that principle scales without compromise.
Luke De LandellesHead of MarTech - Leisure, Flight Centre Travel Group