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This is the third entry in a series examining what key loyalty-program trends in 2026 – from AI-driven commerce to emerging coalitions – mean for brands and consumers. Read more in the series here.

By Uwe Stueckmann

In the world of customer loyalty, brands are chasing a kind of mathematical impossibility in an attempt to make everyone feel special. As companies lean further into premiumization, they risk triggering a secondary effect that may prove far more damaging to brand equity: mass devaluation.

When a priority lane welcomes up to 40% of passengers, it is no longer priority. Whether at the lounge, the boarding gate or the express-pickup counter, what were once seen as “benefits” have simply become additional – often more crowded – lines. The result is a form of “access inflation,” where benefits that were once designed to differentiate begin to lose their meaning.

The points-to-pennies pivot

The primary driver of this trend is the aggressive shift toward revenue-based earning, where rewards are tied directly to dollars spent rather than engagement or behaviour. For years, loyalty was a game of arbitrage where savvy consumers could maximize value. In 2026, the house is closing those loopholes.

Air Canada’s overhaul of Aeroplan is the most high-profile example. By moving to a model of one point per $1 spent, they have decimated the value for long-haul economy travellers. And similarly, with its Reserve Tiers, Starbucks has effectively put a cap on the value of its standard rewards. To make the top 5% feel like royalty, the other 95% are being taxed.

The death of the road warrior

This shift is particularly evident among frequent business travellers. As more programs move toward spend-based qualification (see Delta’s MQD program), a growing number of high-frequency, lower-fare travellers are being left behind.

Corporate travellers are often tethered to booking tools that mandate the lowest available fare. Someone could fly 100,000 miles a year on discounted economy tickets and still fail to hit top-tier status. Brands are effectively telling their most frequent users, “Your presence is a cost; only your margin is an asset.” In service industries, “softer” benefits like a quiet lounge, early boarding privileges and flexible ticket-change policies are some of the only perks that make the gruelling reality of 40-plus weeks on the road bearable. When you remove the sense of dignity, you take away the reason to stay.

The retail ‘algorithm tax’

As agentic commerce takes shape, loyalty is becoming less about choice and more about system design. In retail, specifically, a similar dynamic is playing out, though more subtly. Traditional loyalty models promised a clear exchange – spend a certain amount, earn a predictable reward. Today, many programs rely on personalized offers that reward customers only when they purchase specific items “on offer.”

This creates what might be considered an “algorithm tax.” A customer may spend $200 on a weekly shop at Sobeys or Loblaw-owned banners and earn nothing, simply because none of those purchases align with current offers. Over time, this kind of algorithmic throttling can quietly reduce the effective earn rate without consumers immediately noticing.

But there is a subliminal equation at play that eventually leads to the question: “When did I last earn a meaningful reward? Is this program still worth it for me?” If the answer becomes unclear, the incentive to remain loyal weakens and the lowest prices inevitably regain primacy. This is the slippery slope at the end of the “loyalty-hype cycle” that leads to program defection and, ultimately, brand disengagement.

The infinite ladder: micro-tiers and new rungs

The problem is that most brands treat this “loyalty ladder” as a static object. They forget that for a ladder to work, you must have strategies that address customers at every rung – not just the top.

As concepts like “standard” and “gold” tiers become commoditized, brands are forced into a cycle of infinite elevation where they continually build out new, even more exclusive rungs at the top in an attempt to escape the mass devaluation below. The future of the ladder isn’t just adding more rungs, it’s the “micro-tier” – temporary, targeted bursts of status or privilege that can be deployed in real time.

These can take several forms. A retailer might offer a one-time premium service, such as home pickup for returns, to test a new benefit without committing to it permanently. A travel brand might extend limited access perks to customers who narrowly miss a higher tier, creating goodwill at relatively low cost. Or a program might grant short-term “gold” status to encourage specific behaviours, such as purchases from higher-margin private labels.

In each case, the goal is the same: to deliver moments of exclusivity without permanently diluting the value of top-tier benefits.

The bottom line

It’s time for retailers and service providers to stop treating “premium” as a marketing label and begin viewing it as an inventory problem. If you cannot guarantee the experience because you’ve sold too many tickets to the show, you haven’t built loyalty. You’ve built a bottleneck.

The future of the “premium” experience isn’t a plastic card or a shiny app interface. It is the cold, hard math of exclusion. As agentic commerce takes hold, the brands that succeed won’t be the ones with the best slogans, they will be the ones who use micro-tiers and yield management to ensure their most profitable rungs don’t collapse altogether.

Uwe Stueckmann is a former EVP of customer experience and SVP of marketing and CRM at Loblaw and VP of marketing and CRM at Shoppers Drug Mart. He is also the co-founder of Innovate Marketing, a consultancy launched last fall that focuses on AI’s effects on commerce.