A professional association wants to scale member renewals by giving people a reason to think about their membership more than once a year, at renewal time.
A popular travel influencer wants to scale by getting more revenue from travel recommendations than they typically get from collaborations with OTAs (online travel agencies), which have well-known limitations.
A digital-first bank wants to scale by standing out from ten other apps offering the exact same cash-back percentage and the exact same round of funding announcement.
One popular solution to all these diverse needs is: a white label travel platform, or co-branded travel sites.
In this article, we’ll discuss how white label travel portals help businesses scale, what types of businesses benefit most, and some real world examples of success.
When a business wants to offer discount travel booking as a membership benefit, they have a few options. They could negotiate the deals, build the platform and run the program themselves. However, even large corporations find the work involved to be unfeasible, the results inferior, or both. Small businesses find it impossible.
That's why most businesses choose instead to work with a provider of a white label travel platform. What is a white label travel portal? It is third-party travel booking technology for hotels, flights, car rentals, and sometimes even activities like theme park tickets. What makes it white label is the ability for a business to rebrand the booking technology as its own, so members never see the underlying vendor. All they see is awesome value, and the business they have to thank for it.
The benefits of working with a provider include:
Scaling white label travel programs for businesses means increasing revenue without
White label travel programs add massive amounts of value for little cost and less effort. More and more businesses are learning this already. The percentage of loyalty providers that offer travel rewards jumped from 65% to 95% (those with direct booking from 65% to 84%) in just 2 years.1 Travel rewards fill a growing need as consumers are becoming increasingly hungry for deals that will make their travel dreams possible.
But, how does that actually help a business scale? They mainly help in one (or more) of three ways.
White label travel programs for businesses scale engagement by giving members a reason to open the app or renew. It gives them incentive to use their benefit often, not just when it’s time to renew or purchase again.
That "forget it exists" problem is real and measured. In fact, 34% of U.S. adults frequently forget to use the loyalty programs to which they belong.2 Embedding travel into a relationship a member already has such as through their bank account, their association membership, or their cashback app helps keep them active. The upside for the brands that get this right is substantial: 80% of consumers say a loyalty program makes them more likely to keep buying from a brand, and 85% say it makes them more likely to recommend it.3
Who benefits: credit unions/community banks, regional and national retail banks, associations/professional membership organizations, alumni networks and leadership/honor societies, cashback and rewards apps, employee benefits and perks platforms, insurance providers with member portals, labor unions and trade organizations.
This is where the model looks least like traditional loyalty and most like a business decision. McKinsey's research on loyalty economics found that enlisting partners to expand what a program can offer is one of the most reliable ways to grow revenue without building new categories from scratch, and that top-performing programs boost revenue from engaged members by 15 to 25% annually.4
Who benefits: travel influencers and content creators (using co-branded travel websites), independent travel agencies without proprietary booking technology, niche publishers and media sites with travel-adjacent content, nonprofit and cause-based fundraising organizations, college athletic departments and NIL/booster programs, affiliate marketers currently reliant on OTA commission structures.
A white label travel platform differentiates a brand because financial perks alone (points, percentage-off, cash back) are the easiest thing for a competitor to copy and the easiest thing a member forgets to use.
The average consumer holds 20 loyalty program memberships, but is only active in half of them.3 What sticks is harder to replicate. Travel, as an emotionally weighted, aspirational category, is exactly the kind of benefit Forrester found drives real differentiation: 82% of consumers say they'll spend more with brands that make them feel appreciated,2 and a booked trip does that in a way a 5% discount code doesn't. Pairing that kind of aspirational reward with everyday value, building one loyalty loop out of travel perks and in-store discounts, tends to outperform either offer running on its own.
Who benefits: fintechs and neobanks, subscription box and ecommerce loyalty programs, telecom and wireless carriers, co-branded credit card issuers, direct-to-consumer apps competing primarily on cash-back rate, emerging loyalty programs entering a saturated market.
Theory is easy. What actually happens when an organization plugs into a white label travel platform is more interesting and more useful, if you're trying to decide whether this is worth doing.
Waypoint Network, a fundraising company, had a revolutionary idea to help athletics departments raise funds at a time when they needed it most. Waypoint designed a way to help fans (who spend lots of money on travel for away games and personal vacations) save on their travel expenses, AND fundraise by booking through a white label travel website branded to their favorite university. At first Waypoint tried to build a custom platform, but they needed to move faster while the opportunity was fresh. Access was able to build their first site in three weeks (a typical timeline to get a white label travel website up and running). Learn more in this case study.
The National Society of Leadership and Success (NSLS) launched a white-labeled travel platform in the spring of 2020 so it would be in place when members started to travel again after a year of not going anywhere. NSLS partnered with Access because they wanted a way to communicate with members so that every touchpoint, every email, added value. The results weren't subtle: hotel bookings jumped 44%, Disney ticket purchases jumped 56%, and NSLS's year-over-year revenue from member travel purchases climbed 34%. It was an instant boost to their member acquisition and retention efforts. Learn more in the case study.
The first and most crucial step to launching your own white label travel portal is finding a reliable provider to partner with. You want a partner that provides great value to your members, and does all the heavy lifting behind the scenes so you don’t have to.
Don’t know where to start? Feel free to reach out to the acquisition and retention experts at Access. We love helping businesses big and small scale with B2C and B2B travel loyalty. Our greatest purpose is helping businesses build loyalty programs that keep their members engaged, generate revenue, and help them stand out in a sea of loyalty programs. And if you're still early in the research process, Travel Rewards Explained: What They Are, How They Work, and Business Use Cases covers the fundamentals this article builds on.