Canada's Loyalty Program Boom: Inside YEGplus, Wayfair Rewards, and the AIR MILES Rebrand
Everyone has a loyalty program now. Your coffee shop, your grocery store, your gym, probably your dentist's office. Deloitte puts Canadian enrollment north of 90%, one of the most loyalty-saturated markets anywhere. Which raises the more interesting question: when everyone has a punch card, what actually makes one work?
That's where a run of recent Canadian launches gets genuinely interesting. An airport and a furniture retailer are both building loyalty programs around purchases most people make a handful of times a year at most. A gym chain is doing something different: using partner perks to stand out in a category where everyone already has a loyalty program. And a 34-year-old miles program is proving that sometimes the biggest loyalty story isn't a launch at all, it's admitting your own system had gotten too complicated to use.
The infrequent-purchase problem
Start with the furniture. Wayfair Rewards launched in Canada this spring at $39 CAD a year, giving members 5% back across the catalogue, free shipping regardless of order size, and early access to sales events. Furniture is about as infrequent a purchase category as exists. Most Canadians buy a couch once every several years, not the kind of behaviour loyalty programs are typically built to reinforce.
Wayfair Canada's Connor Delaney called it a program “built to maximize value" over time rather than a single transaction, which is really an admission that the payoff has to come from somewhere other than repeat furniture buying.
Airports have the same problem, just with an even lower ceiling. Most Canadians see the inside of an airport a handful of times a year. So when Edmonton International Airport rolled out YEGplus, calling itself the first airport in the country to launch a full loyalty program, the real story isn't the launch. It's the mechanics: points for parking and terminal purchases, sure, but also for completing surveys and referring a friend. Those two earning paths have nothing to do with flying at all, and they're what actually solve the frequency problem. YEGplus isn't really an airport loyalty program. It's a passenger relationship program that happens to also reward you for flying.
The coalition consolidation
Not every brand is solving for infrequency, though. Some are solving for sameness. GoodLife Rewards layers in perks across more than 100 partner brands, stretching well past the gym floor itself, a tacit acknowledgment that "come to the gym more" isn't enough of a differentiator when every gym has some version of a rewards program. The program has to give members a reason to open the app on days they don't work out at all.
Though, the most telling signal in this space isn't a new program. It's an old one that just changed its name. AIR MILES officially became Blue Rewards this June, retiring a 34-year-old brand and collapsing its confusing Cash Miles/Dream Miles split into a single currency, Blue Points. It's not a retreat from travel, either: Blue Rewards actually added new travel partners like Porter Airlines and Accor hotel brands (Fairmont among them), alongside a broader push into everyday categories like groceries and gas. The real signal is BMO simplifying a program that had gotten too complicated to use, not abandoning what made AIR MILES AIR MILES in the first place.
The rest of the coalition landscape is consolidating around a similar instinct: stack categories together so no single business has to carry the loyalty relationship alone. Canadian Tire's Triangle Rewards already links up with RBC, Petro-Canada, and WestJet, with a Tim Hortons tie-in announced and expected to launch sometime this year. Scene+ keeps expanding too, having added Shell nationwide this spring alongside existing partners like Scotiabank, Empire, and Cineplex.
The logic connecting all three: no individual touchpoint happens often enough or means enough on its own, so the program borrows frequency and relevance from everywhere it can.
The catch
Not everyone's convinced this is working as intended. Mintel's read on the Canadian loyalty landscape is more skeptical: for a lot of members, these programs function as transactional discount tools rather than anything resembling actual loyalty. Apathy, not disloyalty, is the bigger threat, members enroll, then quietly stop engaging once the novelty of sign-up bonuses wears off. Younger consumers remain the most underdeveloped segment, which cuts two ways: it's the biggest growth opportunity in the space, but also the clearest evidence that stacking more partners and perks onto a program doesn't automatically make anyone feel loyal.
That's the tension sitting underneath every example above. An airport, a furniture retailer, a gym chain, and a 34-year-old miles program can all borrow the mechanics of loyalty. Whether they earn the actual thing is a different question, and one none of them have fully answered yet.
If your business doesn't run on daily repeat purchases, that's not a reason to sit out loyalty. It's the exact question these four examples are answering. The mechanics that make an airport or a furniture retailer work aren't the ones built for a coffee shop, and figuring out which ones actually fit your business is the harder, more useful problem.
