BY DHRUV VERMA,
(CEO and Founder, Thriwe)
NEW DELHI | 7 AUGUST 2026
For decades, travel and hospitality brands built their premium relationships directly with the traveller: airline loyalty tiers, hotel elite status, and destination privileges earned through miles flown or nights stayed. That direct relationship still matters. But a growing share of the most valuable premium travellers today are meeting airlines, hotels, and destination brands for the first time through their bank, not through a loyalty programme.
Wealth management and affluent banking programmes now bundle many of the same privileges travel brands have sold directly: airport meet-and-greet, lounge access, concierge-booked tables, travel insurance. For an airline, hotel group, or destination brand, this means a growing customer base is arriving already expecting a benefit that someone else promised on the brand’s behalf. Whether that traveller becomes a loyal, high-value guest often depends on how well the travel or hospitality partner delivers against a promise it did not make itself.
The Customer Banks Are Chasing Is Already Yours:
Ask a bank’s wealth management or affluent banking team who they are building for, and the answer sounds like a description of a traveller the industry already knows well: entrepreneurs running businesses across two countries, professionals on international assignments, families with children studying abroad, frequent flyers whose loyalty spans several airlines and hotel chains rather than one home carrier.
What this customer expects from a bank’s benefits reads like a checklist of what strong travel and hospitality service already looks like: a seamless airport transfer whether they land in Singapore or São Paulo, a beach club day in Dubai, a five-star hotel stay in India, a concierge who can curate dining anywhere as easily as booking a round of golf or padel, insurance and assistance that function when something actually goes wrong overseas. Banks are not inventing this value. They are aggregating value the travel industry already creates, and repackaging it as a wealth management benefit.
That repackaging is an opportunity for travel and hospitality brands as much as a risk of disintermediation. A hotel group, beach club, golf and padel network, or destination management company that can deliver consistently across markets is exactly the kind of partner banks are actively searching for, and increasingly willing to pay for at scale.
What Banks Actually Need From Travel Partners:
Talk to the teams building these programmes and one requirement comes up more than any other: consistency across geography. A bank’s affluent customer does not care whether a benefit is delivered by a five-star chain or a boutique local operator. They care whether it shows up the same way in every city they land in, and that is the real test now applied to every partnership conversation.
Most premium banking programmes still fail that test. The gaps are rarely about the quality of individual travel or hospitality partners; they are about coverage. Airport transfers and curated destination experiences thin out beyond major hubs. A concierge service that reads well on a benefits brochure can turn out to be a call centre that struggles to book anything outside a handful of cities. For a travel or hospitality brand with genuinely global reach, that gap is the opening banks are trying to fill.
The travel and hospitality brands winning this business treat multi-market delivery as core infrastructure, not a stretch goal reserved for their biggest markets. That consistency, more than brand prestige on its own, decides whether a bank keeps routing affluent customers to a partner or starts looking elsewhere.
One Partnership, Many Banks:
Getting into a bank’s benefits programme used to mean negotiating a bilateral deal market by market and bank by bank: slow, resource-heavy, and difficult for any travel or hospitality brand to scale beyond a handful of relationships. That is changing. Benefits infrastructure platforms now sit between banks and travel partners, integrating a partner once and making it available across dozens of bank programmes and markets at the same time.
For a travel or hospitality brand, that changes the economics of the opportunity. One integration can open a much wider set of premium banking programmes across geographies, instead of negotiating, pricing, and servicing each bank relationship separately. The bank remains the customer’s primary relationship; the delivery infrastructure behind it stays invisible to everyone except the traveller receiving a benefit that simply works.
The Window Is Open, But Not Indefinitely:
Neobanks, travel-first fintechs, and private banks are all competing for the same globally mobile customer, and all of them are looking for the same thing: travel and hospitality partners who can deliver without an asterisk once the customer leaves their home city. Brands that plug into these networks early get preferential placement across a fast-growing affluent banking customer base. Brands that wait may find the banks have already chosen their partners.
Banking has spent the past decade rebuilding itself around the customer’s everyday life, and travel now sits at the centre of that promise. For airlines, hotel groups, golf and padel networks, beach clubs, and destination management companies, that is a real and growing distribution channel arriving inside what looks, from the outside, like a banking trend. The brands that recognise it early will not simply be featured in someone else’s benefits programme. They will help decide what “premium” means to a traveller who increasingly chooses loyalty based on where the experience actually shows up.
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