Airports don’t usually get to be part of the loyalty conversation. Airlines do. Hotels do. But Edmonton International Airport (YEG), a hub serving 8 million passengers a year, decided to reframe the conversation around aviation loyalty!
They needed a way to turn scattered retail, dining, and parking spend into repeat visits and real revenue insight, not just a card that tracks purchases.
The solution was to create Edmonton Airport’s very own loyalty program: YEGplus, the first of its kind at a Canadian airport. Now let’s explore how Antavo empowers building loyalty and data visibility for YEG.
Already feeling inspired to start cooking up your own loyalty program? Explore our ready-to-use Loyalty Program Concept Worksheet!
What Is the YEGplus Loyalty Program?
YEGplus is Edmonton International Airport’s tier-based loyalty program that rewards travelers for spend across the entire airport, not just a single gate or a single brand.
Members earn points when they book parking, when they shop or dine with participating merchants, and even when they upload receipts from purchases made anywhere in the terminal.
Points convert into free parking, gift cards, and entries into experiential rewards, including a $20,000 travel package sweepstakes open to new members through September 2026.
Why Does an Airport Loyalty Program Need to Work Differently Than an Airline Or Retail Program?
An airline program rewards a single, repeatable decision: which carrier you book with. A retail program rewards a single, repeatable habit: which store you walk into. An airport loyalty program has neither luxury.
YEGplus can’t rely on a traveler choosing Edmonton over another airport the way a coffee drinker chooses Starbucks over an independent café, since most people don’t pick their airport at all. Their itinerary does.
That changes what the program has to reward. A retailer builds loyalty around one merchant and one purchase type.
The Challenge for Edmonton Airport: Data Visibility
An airport is closer to a shopping mall that also happens to control parking, security flow, and gate access, dozens of unrelated merchants under one roof, each with its own till, none of them talking to each other.
Before YEGplus, a traveler could grab a coffee, pay for parking, and pick up a gift at three different systems that had no idea they were the same person.
So the real program design challenge isn’t earning loyalty to the airport itself. It’s stitching together spend the airport already owns but never used to see, then giving travelers a reason to engage between the few times a year they actually pass through the gates.
How Does YEGplus Make Invisible Airport Spend Visible?
For YEGplus, the technical architecture centers on Antavo acting as the core loyalty engine, connecting to a specialized ecosystem of vendors for receipt scanning, parking, and customer data.
A coffee at Starbucks, a sandwich at Tim Hortons, a parking reservation: each gets captured through Antavo’s connection to Veryfi and Chauntry, then rolled into one member profile, instead of vanishing into separate merchant systems.
What used to be disconnected transactions across dozens of vendors becomes a single, structured feed of passenger spend data the airport can actually act on.
How Does the Edmonton Loyalty Program Drive Behavior, Not Just Points?
Antavo’s Challenges module turns the YEGplus loyalty program into something way more active than a card that stamps purchases.
Members complete different gamified actions, such as scavenger hunts, friend referrals, quizzes, and video views, earning points even between flights when they aren’t spending a dollar.
That same points balance also unlocks the reward side of the equation, from everyday redemptions to entries into higher-value sweepstakes like the current $20,000 travel package, giving members a reason to chase points well beyond the next parking discount.
Layer in the three-tier structure (Essential, Silver, Gold), and every interaction, transactional or not, is quietly nudging frequency and engagement upward.
How Does Loyalty Data Fuel Edmonton Airport’s Revenue Decisions?
Capturing spend data is only half the story. The other half is what YEG actually does with it once it starts flowing in.
Program administrators use YEGplus to connect passenger behavior back to commercial planning, from where to grow merchant partnerships to how parking and retail performance factor into the airport’s broader revenue strategy.
That’s the real shift: an airport loyalty program stops being a marketing add-on and becomes a live input into how an entire facility is run.
From a program administrator perspective, YEGPlus give us and provide us insightful information about our passengers and this information related to how they spend and where they spend, what is the total spend and the average spend they spend with our partners, which gives us the opportunity to enhance the customer experience for them when they are at the airport. At the same time, we leverage on that information, looking to support the aeronautical and non-aeronautical revenue growth.
How Antavo’s Technology Empowers The YEGplus Airport Loyalty Program
Speed, flexibility, and easy platform management have been absolutely instrumental for YEG. All of which Antavo delivers with flying colors through its Tiers, Rewards, Workflows, and Challenges Modules.
Exactly why YEG can run something like the current 100-point join bonus or the flight sweepstakes without waiting on a development cycle, and why updating Challenges post-launch stays simple rather than requiring a rebuild each time.
Antavo has been instrumental in bringing the program to life. They understood our brand and storytelling. They helped us to build a platform that is flexible and
easy to manage. With challenges, we could easily launch challenges and update them. We can update challenges which makes the program very flexible, dynamic and very engaging.
Antavo’s direct Klaviyo integration then carries that same agility into communication, keeping messaging tied to actual member behavior instead of generic blasts.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Edmonton International Airport Loyalty Program
Why did YEG build a proprietary loyalty program instead of relying on airline loyalty schemes?
YEGplus, launched in 2026, is the first loyalty program of its kind at a Canadian airport, a useful case study for any brand weighing a proprietary program. Owning the program directly gave YEG control of its own passenger data, unifying parking, retail, and dining spend into one profile to drive repeat engagement and feed commercial strategy.
What earning mechanics make an airport loyalty program like YEGplus effective?
YEGplus pairs transactional earning (parking bookings, receipt uploads) with non-transactional Challenges like referrals, quizzes, and scavenger hunts. For marketers, the mix is the takeaway: spend-based earning alone can’t sustain engagement between infrequent visits, so gamified actions keep the account active and collecting data even when a member isn’t purchasing.
How does reward design need to differ for an airport loyalty program versus a retail one?
A retailer’s rewards revolve around one product catalog. An airport’s redemption mix has to work across dozens of unrelated merchants and moments, from a parking discount to a gift card to a high-value entry like YEGplus’s $20,000 travel sweepstakes, giving members reasons to engage at very different points in their journey, not just at checkout.
What can every loyalty program operator learn from YEGplus?
YEGplus is a useful case for any brand operating across fragmented, low-frequency touchpoints, not just airports. Shopping malls, event venues, and multi-location retailers face the same core issue: spend happens everywhere, but visibility happens nowhere. What Antavo demonstrates here is that the fix isn’t a bigger rewards catalog. It’s connecting scattered transactions, gamified engagement, and revenue reporting into one system a business can actually act on.
Conclusion
YEGplus proves loyalty isn’t limited to airlines or retailers with repeat foot traffic. Any business sitting on scattered, hard-to-track spend has the same opportunity: unify the data, reward more than the transaction, and let that insight drive real commercial decisions. Antavo made that shift possible for an entire airport. It can do the same for you.
Antavo is the AI loyalty and incentives platform that brings together loyalty, promotions, and agentic AI to turn customers into regulars: the customers who come back on their own, buy more often, and bring others with them. For more than a decade, Antavo has powered identity-led loyalty strategies for brands including SKIMS, Paul Smith, KFC, Flying Tiger Copenhagen, and Hyatt’s Inclusive Collection. Marketers build, change, and launch programs and promotions themselves, without waiting on engineering.
If you’re tired of paying to win the same customers twice, book a call with our experts and see how Antavo turns them into regulars.
Zsuzsanna Ban Zsuzsanna Ban LinkedIn profile
Zsuzsanna is a Loyalty Specialist and Certified Loyalty Expert™ with years of experience in digital marketing and e-commerce. Zsuzsanna is known for having an analytic approach and high-level communication skills, helping her deliver engaging content. In her free time, she enjoys watching Formula 1 and listening to endless Taylor Swift playlists.
