The History of Crane Loyalty Layer
In the early days of Hitit, when the company was building the vision for its future product line, Crane Loyalty became the first product Hitit had invested in. The decision was made after a market research of airline IT components. In 1997, Loyalty emerged as one of the strongest candidates because there were very few mature products in the market and having a frequent flyer program was still a very new trend at that time. American Airlines established AAdvantage in 1981, which is the first modern airline loyalty program and had been the inspiration for other airlines. Most of the early adopters were large airlines with powerful IT departments which set on to build their system in their IT departments. It took more years for the other carriers to follow the trend. The market was full of airlines with either no loyalty program or with a very simple early implementation that needed urgent improvement to be competitive. So at the time, most of the airlines were racing to implement or improve their frequent flyer programs and there was a need for a good loyalty solution.
In 1998, Hitit started development of its frequent flyer system which was the first member of Crane Airline Suite. In 2000, Turkish Airlines became the first carrier to implement the program as they were leaving the Qualiflier Alliance and Qualiflier Frequent Flyer program. The migration was completed by September 2000 and the first instance of Crane Loyalty went into production.
Following this implementation, Hitit increased its investment on the products and focused on the worldwide marketing of the product. Other airlines in Europe, Middle East and Asia-Pacific followed and in a few years the product was in use in more than ten airlines around the world.
In 2008, Hitit invested in improving and modernizing the platform and the first fully web-enabled version of the software was released.
With its rich features, ease of use, fast and efficient implementation methods and a strong post-implementation support, the software quickly became the best-selling loyalty program in the airline market. It has also been adapted to other areas like retail and telecom.
In 2013, an agreement was reached with Amadeus which acquired and integrated the product to its portfolio but Hitit continued to supply it as a part of its Crane Airline Suite, focusing its efforts on better integration with PSS and other key components of Crane product line.
Today Crane Loyalty Layer provides the most advanced loyalty features to support even the most complex loyalty programs. Seamless integration with all other processes in the airline to increases the customer engagement and improves the customers’ experience in all touchpoints with the airline.