Alaska Air lets Atmos Rewards members pick points accrual method

What happened

Alaska Airlines is overhauling how members of its Atmos Rewards loyalty programme earn points, giving them the ability to choose the basis on which their points accrue. Rather than a single fixed formula, members will be able to select whether they earn based on distance travelled, the price paid for the ticket, or the number of flight segments flown.

The change, reported by Customer Experience Dive, effectively lets travellers tailor the earning mechanic to their own flying pattern — for example, someone who takes frequent short-haul, multi-segment trips could choose the segment-based model, while a long-haul or premium-fare flyer might prefer distance- or spend-based accrual.

Why it matters

Loyalty programmes have historically forced a one-size-fits-all earning formula onto a customer base with wildly different travel habits, which inevitably leaves some segments feeling under-rewarded. By handing the choice to members, Alaska is treating personalisation not as a marketing overlay but as a structural feature of the programme itself — customers self-select into the value model that best reflects how they actually fly.

For experience and loyalty leaders more broadly, this signals a shift from static, airline-optimised earning rules toward flexible, member-optimised ones. It suggests that in a crowded loyalty landscape, differentiation is increasingly coming from giving customers agency over programme mechanics rather than simply adding new perks or tiers.

The Renascence take

What looks like a minor tweak to points math is actually a behavioural design decision with real consequences for perceived fairness and engagement.

Most loyalty programmes fail not because the rewards are too small, but because the earning rule feels arbitrary or misaligned to how a given customer actually behaves — and misalignment breeds disengagement long before it breeds complaints. By letting members pick their own accrual logic, Alaska is quietly applying a core behavioural-economics principle: people trust and value systems more when they feel they authored the rules, even within a fixed set of options. The real test isn't whether points are optimised on the back end — it's whether the choice is presented simply enough, at the right moment, that members actually make an active decision rather than defaulting passively. Operators watching this should ask less "what formula is fairest" and more "how do we make the fairest formula feel like the member's own choice."