Active loyalty program use falls to 45% as Australians cut back

By James Dore · 2026-10-02

The numbers

Active engagement across Australian loyalty programs fell from 52% in 2025 to 45% in 2026, according to Honeycomb Strategy's Science of Loyalty study.^[1] The study covered 60 programs across three national quantitative surveys and two rounds of qualitative interviews, with the largest wave reaching 1,969 respondents in June 2026.^[2]

The average Australian now actively uses four loyalty programs, down from five the year before.^[1] When someone drops from five to four programs, one program loses a member's spending data entirely, and every retail media network built on that data loses an addressable audience.

Renata Freund, founder of Honeycomb Strategy, said the problem runs deeper than rewards design. "Mental availability for loyalty programs isn't just limited, it's shrinking. Consumers hold fewer programs top of mind than they used to, so the fight isn't for attention once, it's for staying there."^[1]

Who is holding on

Flybuys topped the retail loyalty category with 79% of its members actively favouring shopping where they can earn or redeem points, ahead of Woolworths' Everyday Rewards in second place.^[1] Qantas Frequent Flyer led the travel category, with Velocity Frequent Flyer second and Booking.com Genius third.

MyMacca's Rewards posted 65% active engagement and MECCA Beauty Loop reached 54%, both sitting well above the sector average of 45%.^[1] Telstra Plus recorded 64% active engagement, making it the leading telco loyalty program in the study.^[1]

Kieran Collins, strategy director at Honeycomb Strategy, said ease of mental recall and ease of purchase outrank reward size in a crowded field, attributing the strong results of high performers to those behavioural factors.^[1]

Raw membership versus active use

The sharpest tension in this year's data sits between raw membership growth and the active-use decline. Qantas Frequent Flyer reported 18.9 million members as of 30 June 2026, up 7% year-on-year, per the group's Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) results filed on 27 August 2026.^[3] Applying the sector-wide active-engagement rate of 45% to that base puts roughly 10.3 million of those members in the actively engaged column, a figure Qantas has not published and the Honeycomb study does not confirm, but one that shows how far raw counts can diverge from usable audiences.

The study was commissioned by Honeycomb Strategy, a consultancy that advises loyalty programs commercially. The three-wave design, surveying in November 2024, July 2025 and June 2026, gives the trend line more credibility than a single-wave study would, though the underlying incentive to publish striking findings sits with the commissioner.^[2]

Retail media audience pools

Woolworths' Cartology, Coles' Coles 360, and the Flybuys/Unpacked network all sell loyalty-derived audiences to advertisers, and those audiences are defined by members who are actually transacting, not just holding a card. A seven-point fall in active engagement across the sector compresses the pool of people these networks can legitimately target.

Both Cartology and Coles 360 now position first-party transaction data as their core advertising product. If active loyalty use continues falling at this pace, the quality of the audiences they take to market follows the same trajectory. A third annual wave would show whether the fall is a trend or a one-year dip.

James Dore

James Dore is Strategy Director at Bushnote, a leader in SEO and AEO in Australia. He writes on search, AI and the technology decisions shaping government and industry.