Yesterday, after returning from my trip to the Bay Area this weekend, I qualified for a free Rapid Rewards trip on Southwest airlines and received a confirmation email with the award codes. Yet the email did not include a link to post an announcement to Facebook or any other element of social interaction or social gaming–for example, to see which of my Facebook friends had qualified for trips or who had earned the most credits in the past year.
In many ways, frequent flyer programs are the original social games. Users receive points for activity, they can level up based on combined actions over time, many consider achieving high mileage levels a status symbol, and some go to great lengths to get there. Yet, for some reason, while Zynga, Foursquare, and others have demonstrated the power of enabling users to compete with their friends for points-based activity, for some reason, Southwest and the other airlines seem to have missed this wave.
As far as I know, I have never seen an update on Facebook when a friend has received a new travel award or reached a new level of frequent traveler status. For that matter, I have never been asked to post to Facebook when I booked a new flight or completed a trip, nor have I been asked if I would like to share my point status with friends as a game or competition (I probably would have no privacy issue with this).
Frequent flyer programs are already hugely successful points-based activity systems. The problem is, right now they seem to be games of solitaire. Hopefully, the airlines and other travel companies soon will take them to the next level.
