Why I Left the Brand Side (And What I Wish I’d Known Before I Did)

In 2019, I ran a campaign at Air Arabia where members could earn points for all their spending at Majid Al Futtaim malls in the northern emirates of the UAE.

It was a highly targeted, partner-driven, location-specific promotion. If you work in loyalty, you know this is the kind of initiative that sounds incredibly simple in a boardroom, until you try to actually execute it on a legacy airline loyalty platform.

I know the struggle intimately, because I’ve spent years watching operators at other airlines attempt exactly this and fail. But at AirRewards, we built it and launched it without a single line of custom code. We could do this because we were running on a platform that could actually keep pace with our commercial strategy.

I didn’t fully appreciate how unusual that was until I left Air Arabia. It wasn’t until I spent years consulting for programs that physically couldn't execute the strategies I had been running daily that the reality set in.

That experience, witnessing the massive gap between what loyalty operators want to do and what their technology allows them to do, is the exact reason I eventually left the brand side entirely.

The Low-Cost Carrier Crucible

To understand why agility matters, you have to understand Low-Cost Carrier (LCC) loyalty. It is a fundamentally different discipline.

Air Arabia is not a small airline. In 2025, it carried 21.8 million passengers, posted a record AED 1.8 billion in pre-tax profit, and operated 212 routes across six hubs. But in the LCC space, you have no premium cabins to monetize. You have no exclusive lounge access to dangle for top-tier members. Your program's value comes entirely from building a partner ecosystem beyond the flight and activating a price-sensitive customer base that won’t respond to traditional Frequent Flyer Program (FFP) incentives.

When I took over AirRewards in December 2017, the program was ready for reinvention. It lacked commercial discipline, a revenue engine, a defined partner strategy, and the mechanism to connect our loyalty currency to the broader retail ecosystem.

We took a bet and transitioned to a little known platform at the time, Gravty, what it gave me was something most operators never get: the ability to move as fast as the strategy demanded.

Over the next two years, we transformed the program:

• Tripled our retail partners.
• Drove a 3x increase in partner-driven acquisition.
• Doubled total enrollments.
• Increased active member engagement by 240%.
• Delivered over $15 million in loyalty revenue in 2019 alone.

I built a miles-powered retail affiliate network. I launched physical POS earn propositions that actively competed with what full-service carriers were doing. I configured multi-partner offers using a visual rules engine, relying on drag-and-drop conditions instead of waiting on developer requirements.

The platform didn’t create the strategy. I did. But it removed every single friction point between having an idea and getting it into the market.

The Execution Crisis in Modern Loyalty

The wider industry tells a very different story. OAG’s 2025 innovation review confirmed a harsh reality: loyalty remains one of the least-developed areas in airline technology, largely because the underlying data layers remain deeply fragmented.

After Air Arabia, I ran the loyalty consulting arm at Collinson (the organization behind Priority Pass). I saw that fragmentation everywhere. I saw brilliant operators manually building ROI tools to measure profitability and teams mapping point breakage by hand. I saw massive programs trying to run the ambition of a modern ecosystem on infrastructure designed for a simpler era.

The Open Loyalty Trends 2026 report put a definitive number on what I’d been witnessing firsthand: the top challenge loyalty teams face today isn’t strategy. It’s execution.

Crossing Over: From Operator to Enabler

After fifteen-plus years of running programs and consulting for operators stuck on the wrong infrastructure, I joined Loyalty Juggernaut (LJI). I had actually been LJI’s first airline client a decade ago at Air Arabia, so I knew the platform intimately from the operator’s chair.

Today, from the platform side, I see the exact same frustrations I watched during my consulting days playing out across the industry:

• A loyalty director designs a new subscription model, only to learn it will require a new module, a change request (CR), and three months of vendor lead time.
• A program manager wants to add a fourth tier and discovers it’s a two-month development project.
• A marketing team has behavioral data that could double campaign response rates, but the system won’t let them act on it without deep-level backend work.

These are not hypotheticals. These are conversations I have with brilliant loyalty leaders every single week.

At Air Arabia, I never had to have those conversations. I configured partner offers in minutes. I had real-time visibility into program health and partner performance. I didn’t realize I was the exception until I spent years surrounded by the rule.

That is ultimately why I left the brand side. Not because I lost faith in operators. I left because I have seen what becomes possible when a brand's technology actually matches its ambition, and I wanted to make that reality the standard, not the exception.