Flying Blue is the loyalty program of Air France-KLM and Transavia. The miles from Flying Blue can be earned on any SkyTeam Alliance flight, with partners such as Delta Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, Korean Air, AeroMexico, China Airlines, Garuda-Indonesia, and about 15 other airlines.
In 2019, Flying Blue embraced the Currency Alliance platform in order to manage partners more efficiently, and requested that over 15 of their existing partners start to report accrual or exchange transactions via the platform. Since then, nearly 20 additional partners have been added to the program via Currency Alliance.
Flying Blue benefits from our standardized contracts to reduce the burden on the legal department to create custom agreements with each partner. Once commercial terms are reached with a partner, Currency Alliance takes over the entire onboarding process – from analyzing the best way to report transactions, to issuing the Flying Blue miles, to invoicing the partners on behalf of Air France-KLM. Air France-KLM only needs to send a single, consolidated invoice to Currency Alliance each month. Currency Alliance collects the funds from each partner and makes a single payment to the Flying Blue program.
Currency Alliance adapts to the requirements or constraints of each partner to support real-time API integrations or batch file reporting of transactions.
For lower-volume partners, Currency Alliance allows the submission of transactions manually by having a partner representative log into our Management Portal. The loyalty manager enters the loyalty program member’s ID and the amount spent, or the number of miles they want to award; each manual transaction of this type takes 5-8 seconds, but no integration is required. We inject a copy of that accrual transaction directly into the Flying Blue or other loyalty system.
Lowering the set-up costs for new partners opens the door to lower-volume partnerships, which may please customers, but where the level of integration or contracting work required was previously an obstacle to embrace smaller volume partnerships due to profitability concerns.
This collaboration enables the Flying Blue team to be much more agile, reduces burden on the IT department to integrate new partners, and streamlines the legal contracting process. It also allows the accounting department to operate at greater scale by issuing fewer, but much higher-value invoices.
Flying Blue aspires to add hundreds of additional partners over the coming years, allowing loyalty program members to earn more frequently, across a broader network of partners, and get to rewards faster.
The byproduct of all this additional member activity is enhanced insight into the member’s true lifestyle interests, based on how they engage with partners on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis – even if they only fly once or twice per year.
