The New Loyalty Paradigm: Why 2025 Is a Turning Point for Hospitality
Ask any seasoned traveler where their loyalty lies, and you’ll likely hear names like Bonvoy, Hilton Honors, or MGM Rewards. At CRMC 2025, hotel giants Hilton Hotels & Resorts and Omni Hotels & Resorts pulled back the curtain on the infrastructure behind those programs sharing real-world examples that positioned loyalty as more than a marketing initiative. What emerged was a shared conviction: loyalty has become a revenue operating system.
Loyalty isn’t what it used to be. In hospitality today, it has evolved from points-for-nights schemes into real-time ecosystems that orchestrate everything from tier upgrades to mobile check-ins to on-property spend. And increasingly, the brands leading the charge aren’t just launching new offers, they’re re-platforming their tech stacks to support identity resolution, decision automation, and always-on responsiveness.
The biggest shift wasn’t theoretical. It was technical. Three stories, two actively evolving, one already operating at full scale show how quickly this transformation is unfolding and why the architecture behind it now matters as much as the offers guests see on-screen.
Hilton Honors: Real-Time Decisions Powering 82% of Revenue
Hilton Honors is already applying several of the high-impact methods defining modern loyalty. At CRMC, Hilton shared how every booking, profile update, and mobile check-in now flows through a real-time decision layer–it’s no mystery why Hilton is approaching nearly 200M members globally. That speed is not a UX flourish. It’s a revenue imperative, turning a cursory glance into a live upgrade that clears inventory before the guest leaves the app. Engineers reached that milestone by decoupling the rule engine and streaming every signal through Kafka; a stateless evaluator then publishes responses to any endpoint.
The payoff is clear: Hilton has reported consistent increases in RevPAR (revenue per available room), seeing a 3.5% increase in Q4 2024 and an additional 2.5% YoY increase in Q1 2025.
These RevPAR metrics reflect strong revenue growth linked to Hilton’s guest engagement strategies, including loyalty-member bookings. Hilton is clearly embracing several of the foundational capabilities we’ll outline in next week’s Loyalty Methods framework.
Omni Hotels: Operationalizing Loyalty with Data Velocity and Cloud CDP
Omni Hotels & Resorts’ presentation focused on their rollout of a new Customer Data Platform (CDP). How does this overlap with their loyalty program? Well, in early 2024 the hotel chain announced the roll-out of their new and improved, completely redesigned loyalty program reintroducing Select Guest with a sweeping refresh that rewards guests not just for overnight stays but for everything they experience on-property.
The new structure shifts the program away from a traditional nights-based model to a spend-based system, recognizing dollars spent across the full range of amenities including dining, spa, golf, and retail. Guests will now accumulate Omni Credits based on their activity throughout the stay creating faster paths to rewards and elevating how loyalty is measured.
Back to CRMC, in their presentation, Omni shared how they stood up a new CDP in just a few weeks by taking a phased approach, aligning on clear priorities, and selecting the right partner. The result was a platform that delivered real value for the marketing team without the typical complexity or delays. But the impact didn’t stop at marketing as Omni emphasized how their CDP is already beginning to shape on-property operations, proving that when implemented thoughtfully, customer data infrastructure can become a driver of both guest experience and operational agility.
This underscores the importance of selecting the right loyalty engine because a customer engagement strategy cannot succeed without an interconnected MarTech stack.
MGM Rewards: A Full-Scale Loyalty Operating System Built on ReactorCX
But where Hilton and Omni are deploying select building blocks, MGM Rewards illustrates what it looks like when the entire model is brought to life. Powered by ReactorCX, MGM’s platform supports complex member-lifecycle scenarios, seamless enrollment, account linking, and even merge or unmerge operations without downtime. An extensible data model captures every behavioral and transactional signal across gaming floors, hotel PMS, mobile, kiosks, POS, and partners such as BetMGM and co-branded credit cards; changes propagate instantly to the data warehouse and to open APIs.
Polymorphic activity modeling determines how each interaction contributes to loyalty value, while comprehensive event APIs enable instant, personalized communication back to the guest.
“Bringing together all of MGM’s hotel lines of business with the gaming side was a massive undertaking. We had to unify guest experiences across rooms, restaurants, shows, and the casino all in real time. ReactorCX helped MGM turn that complexity into a seamless, single loyalty platform.”
— Priyanka Narasingu, Technical Product Manager, Loyalty Methods
ReactorCX at MGM ingests over 3M+ total requests per day, from slot pull to mobile taps to in-room transactions. Fast, real-time earn-and-burn supports multiple currencies and tier levels, including pending points that vest over future visits. Marketers launch bonus promotions in hours, targeting tiers, segments, A/B or control groups, locations, and day-parts all while enabling highly personalized streaks and streak goals.
Gamified challenges, property hops, streaks, tier races are configured through a flexible rules engine that also tracks ROI, liability exposure, and partner reimbursement. Because every function is surfaced through API-first services and settled in a member wallet ledger, MGM can extend earn-and-burn to partners like Mastercard, Hyatt, and Royal Caribbean Cruise Line without rewriting core code.
The Result: 60M+ engaged members across 30K+ locations and outlets.
Key Technologies Driving Loyalty Innovation (Kafka, APIs, Identity Resolution)
A pattern emerges. Guest journeys are always in motion, their data should also move in real time, not wait for midnight batch jobs. Decision layers must be stateless, horizontally scalable, and event-driven. Every micro-service identity, earn logic, promotions, experimentation, analytics needs an addressable endpoint, and the member wallet must serve as the canonical ledger of guest value.
When analytics is embedded directly inside the delivery stream, loyalty becomes a self-improving system rather than a retrospective report.
Final Thoughts: Why Tech Architecture Now Defines Guest Loyalty
Hospitality has always sold experiences. CRMC 2025 made it clear that those experiences now depend on architectures capable of reasoning about a guest faster than the guest can swipe to another screen. Hilton Honors showed how milliseconds reshape behavior. Omni demonstrated that data velocity can rewrite operations. MGM Rewards, with ReactorCX, offers the full blueprint of loyalty as an elastic operating system.
Time To Take Action
Seeing what Hilton, Omni, and MGM have built is one thing but understanding how to apply it to your ecosystem is another.
If you’re exploring how to modernize loyalty infrastructure, book a demo to see what a real-time, event-driven loyalty platform can look like for your business.
Sources
CRMC 2025 Conference Session Transcripts & Executive Interviews
Hilton Worldwide Q1 2025 Earnings Report
Hilton Worldwide Q4 Full Year Results
Omni Hotels & Resorts Guest Loyalty Relaunch Announcement, February 2024