While Jet Airways is non-operational, InterMiles, the loyalty programme of Jet Privilege Private Limited (JPPL) has seen a two-fold growth in the number of app downloads since its launch in February.

Vikas Chandak, SVP & Head, Strategic Businesses, Financial Products & Partnership, InterMiles said that cessation of Jet Airways’ operations in April 2019 pushed InterMiles to carve its own niche and expand its offerings beyond travel.

The programme, InterMiles, was formerly known as JetPrivilege. Etihad Aviation Group holds 50.1 per cent stake in JPPL whereas Jet owns over 49.9 per cent stake.

On Thursday, InterMiles announced ‘InterMiles Everyday’ which allows members to make everyday transactions and earn InterMiles rewards from a host of offerings in essential services, healthcare, learning, shopping, dining, travel among others. Until now, the point system was essentially relevant only for airline travel.

Speaking exclusively to BusinessLine , Chandak said that since the beginning of the Covid-19 imposed lockdown, the engagement on the app had seen a massive boost, which garnered into the 2x growth.

“The InterMiles app has witnessed close to 2,00,000 downloads since its launch in February 2020 with increasing daily active users. Our app downloads and daily active users have accelerated rapidly since we started the pilot of InterMiles Everyday last month,” he said.

The company started a pilot by gradually introducing and expanding its offerings to fuel purchase, hotel bookings and dining for customers to use the ‘miles’ or points earned. Earlier, members earned and spent miles via booking flight tickets with Jet Airways or its partner airlines.

“Initial reactions from members is that there is a massive scope to create activation. We also realised by the gradual expansion that the stickiness to our platform is very, very strong. We’ve seen some green shoots of the overall engagement on how members keep coming back because the programme is now more inclusive.”

Online push

According to industry experts, there has been a massive shift in the way Indians spend their time on digital platforms. To top that, there has been a growth in digital payments too.

InterMiles, too, noticed that shift. “And therefore, it’s also our evolution as a programme to be in sync with the members’ lifestyle. The lockdown has prompted new habits and behaviours to take hold; members are spending a lot more time online — buying, learning, accessing entertainment, and building social connections have all become increasingly virtual,” Chandak said.

Since its inception in 2014, InterMiles has had close to 10 million members. InterMiles Everyday has partnered with over 2,500 merchandisers.

Going forward, in order to make InterMiles earnings an everyday habit, InterMiles Everyday has opened a range of fun and engaging activities like quizzes and games, which members can enjoy while sitting at home.

Additionally, through partnerships, InterMiles will enable its members to earn miles for all their online shopping across players like Amazon, Flipkart, and Zivame, as well as while learning on Udemy, Economist, TedX and Eduonix.

Jet Airways grounded its operations in April 2019. When asked if the shift in strategy coincided with Jet’s demise, Chandak said: “ Actually, it has nothing to do with Jet, but essentially we already had a lot of opportunities to earn miles and redeem much even for them.”

In fact, the crisis, according to him, pushed the company to expand its horizons. “And I think we found ourselves in the crisis because of Jet’s issues and customers being unable to redeem miles that they collected over a long time. But, that was also a great opportunity for us to expand, and the results so far are great!”

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