Loyalty Programme Tiers Now Outnumber The Metals They Are Named After
The average casino programme has grown from three tiers in 2005 to eleven. Designers ran out of precious metals in 2014 and have been using rocks since.
The average casino loyalty programme now has eleven tiers, up from three in 2005, according to an analysis of forty programmes by Gambling Paper’s data desk. Over the same period the number of precious metals has held at about eight, and the programmes overtook them in 2014.
The staircase
Plotted by year, tier counts climb in a gentle staircase until 2014, when the line bends sharply upward. That, our analysis found, is the year designers ran out of metals and moved on to stones, then to colours, then to abstract nouns. One programme now has a tier called Beyond, which sits below one called Infinite Plus.
A typical ladder, from the bottom
- Bronze
- Silver
- Gold
- Platinum
- Titanium
- Obsidian
- Onyx Reserve
- Beyond
- Infinite
- Infinite Plus
- Sovereign Black, by invitation, which has never been extended
Nobody wants to be told they are Bronze. Almost everybody is Bronze.
The gap in benefits was harder to chart. At the bottom, members receive a plastic card. Three tiers up, they receive a metal one. At the top they receive a personal host, a suite and a phone call on their birthday, and the spend data suggests that between them they have paid for the plastic, the metal and the call.
Methodology: Tier counts came from public programme pages and, where those ran out, from brochures. Where a tier’s rank was unclear, analysts sorted by how dark the card was. Two programmes declined to describe their top tier on the grounds that not knowing about it is part of the benefit.
