Benchmarking Asia-Pacific’s Low-Cost Carriers: Who Actually Owns the Relationship?

The Loyalty Shift: Season 2, Edition 6

The Caravelo Loyalty Scorecard measures the strength of an airline’s relationship with its customers. We score each brand against the three pillars of the Relational Anchor (Access, Control, and Convenience) across fifteen sub-dimensions on a 0-5 scale, then combine them into a single Anchor Score. If you missed the methodology piece, you can find it here.

Today the scorecard reaches Southeast Asia, where three carriers competing for the same budget traveler have each answered the loyalty question differently. Scoot rents its program from its parent, Cebu Pacific gave theirs to a retail group, and VietJet built one from scratch. Nearly every airline without a frequent flyer program eventually confronts some version of that choice, unless it refuses loyalty altogether as Ryanair has. 

If the airline’s ownership decided the outcome, these three should end far apart. However, even with different ownership structures, they finish within a rounding error of each other, and where they differ tells you more than any total.

The three programs we assessed

We assessed what each carrier operates today, not what it has retired or paused.

• Scoot runs no program of its own. Its loyalty surface is KrisFlyer, the Singapore Airlines frequent flyer program, as it reaches the Scoot flyer through earning, a new award chart, and elite benefits on board.
• Cebu Pacific retired its own program, GetGo, and folded its members into Go Rewards, the retail coalition owned by its sister company Robinsons Retail. The airline is now a partner in the program its flyers join.
• VietJet runs SkyJoy, a coalition program launched in May 2023 with four earned tiers, a purchasable Gold pass called Sky+, and redemption across a claimed 1,200-plus brands in five countries.

Both Cebu Pacific and VietJet have also sold prepaid flight passes in the past, but neither product is scored here because neither is on sale today. Cebu Pacific’s Super Pass vouchers expired in December 2025 with no new run announced, and VietJet’s pandemic-era Power Pass ended in October 2022 and never came back.

The Asia-Pacific Scorecard: Three Owners, Three Shapes

Each carrier’s score draws a triangle, where a full and even shape means an anchored relationship and a thin corner shows where the program has invested least.

No two of these triangles agree about what a loyalty program is for.

• Scoot leans toward Convenience and runs thin on Access, the familiar outline of a polished commodity.
• Cebu Pacific is thinner still at the Access corner, the lowest on this board, held up by decent Control and Convenience.
• VietJet draws a shape this series has never recorded, a triangle that stretches furthest on Access and then falls away on both other pillars.

The three Anchor Scores are nearly identical, separated by just 0.3, the closest finish this series has seen since the US majors. In other words, how each carrier chose to own its loyalty barely changed how much loyalty it built. What that choice did change is where each program is strong and where it is weak, which is exactly what the triangles show. And the corner that matters most is Access, because exclusive value behind a login is the one moat an AI agent cannot copy.

We start with the carrier that never built a program at all.

Scoot’s KrisFlyer: Loyalty on Loan

Scoot is the only carrier in this edition with no loyalty program of its own, but at the same time also the one with the most valuable currency attached to its boarding passes. Flying Scoot earns KrisFlyer miles, the currency of a program that passed ten million members in January 2025, and the currency now flows both ways, earned on Scoot fares and redeemable on Scoot flights as well as across Singapore Airlines and its partners. When Scoot launched the award chart behind that two-way flow last August, Chief Commercial Officer Calvin Chan described it as “providing greater value for KrisFlyer members”. Inside the SIA Group, that framing makes perfect sense, since Scoot feeds the family program and the family program feeds Scoot.

On Access, the borrowed mechanics have grown quickly over the past year. The award chart launched in August 2025 opened member-gated Saver awards from 1,500 miles, and since May 2026 Scoot is part of KrisFlyer Spontaneous Escapes, a members-only monthly window of discounted awards (a 2 out of 5 on Exclusive Inventory). Elite Silver and Gold members get priority check-in, boarding, and baggage on Scoot (a 2 out of 5 on Priority and Early Access), and status builds unusually fast, at 2.5 Elite miles for every KrisFlyer mile earned on Scoot (a 2 out of 5 on Volume and Frequency Enablement). The limits are ones of depth rather than direction. There is no lounge and nothing to upgrade into on board, and no mechanic promises a member a seat when demand spikes (a 0 out of 5 on Guaranteed Availability), which is why these scores sit at developing rather than strong.

On Control, Scoot runs a strict but transparent regime. The fare rules state plainly that cancellations, refunds and credits are not permitted, and that changes cost a fee plus fare difference up to three hours before departure (a 2 out of 5 on Flexibility and Cancellation). The other side of that strictness is that little is hidden. The fee chart is public, the award levels are fixed, and even the modest redemption value, under a cent per mile by specialist math, is visible before you spend (a 3 out of 5 on Pricing Clarity).

On Convenience, Scoot rides the best digital product in the edition.

• Its app holds 4.7 stars across 28,800 Google Play reviews, with forced logouts the one recurring complaint in an otherwise well-reviewed product (a 4 out of 5 on Digital User Experience).
• Booking runs through the standard web and app flow, with award redemptions handled through a KrisFlyer login on top of the Scoot account rather than a separate portal (a 3 out of 5 on Booking Simplicity).
• Miles earned on a Scoot fare flow onward into Kris+, KrisShop and Pelago, an ecosystem no other carrier here can borrow (a 3 out of 5 on Cross-Journey Integration).

The borrowed model cuts both ways. Renting gave Scoot the strongest loyalty surface in this edition at a fraction of the cost of building one, with ten million members and a hard currency included on day one. The price is that pricing, rules, and the member relationship sit with KrisFlyer, and Singapore Airlines already adjusted award rates in November 2025, so whatever the program decides next, Scoot’s proposition moves with it.

Scoot’s triangle leans toward Convenience and sits nearly flat on Access (Anchor 2.3), the classic outline of a Well-Built Commodity. What holds the score back, though, has little to do with whose name is on the program. It is the Access corner, where nothing behind the login yet gives a traveler a reason to return that a rival could not match.

Cebu Pacific’s Go Rewards: Loyalty, Outsourced

Cebu Pacific once ran its own frequent flyer program. In 2021 it announced GetGo’s retirement and moved its members into Go Rewards, the coalition run by Robinsons Retail inside the wider JG Summit Holdings group. The airline’s own executive described Cebu Pacific at the time as “excited to be part of this new and improved loyalty program”, and that wording, probably without meaning to, describes the setup exactly. Cebu Pacific takes part in a program that someone else owns.

On Access, membership gates nothing.

• Seat sales are public and there is no member-only inventory to gate (a 1 out of 5 on Exclusive Inventory).
• The only lounge access or early sale alerts a flyer can get arrive through the UnionBank co-brand card at 5,000 pesos a year, not through the program (a 1 out of 5 on Priority and Early Access).
• Points knock pesos off future fares from a minimum of 50 points, but flights paid with points earn nothing back, and nothing anywhere rewards flying more often (a 1 out of 5 on Volume and Frequency Enablement).

The pillar lands at 1.0, the lowest Access of the three.

On Control, the picture improves, and one mechanic stands out. The point carries a fixed peso-denominated value that specialist coverage puts at one peso per point, and the conversion appears directly in the booking flow (a 3 out of 5 on Pricing Clarity). The CEB Flexi add-on buys free cancellation into a Travel Fund that never expires, a rare mechanic in a category where stored value usually evaporates (a 2 out of 5 on Flexibility and Cancellation).

On Convenience, Cebu Pacific is competent, and built around how the Philippine market pays.

• The app rates 4.1 across 42,900 reviews and books up to twenty passengers in a single flow, useful in a market where families and groups travel together (a 3 out of 5 on both Booking Simplicity and Digital User Experience).
• Payment runs on the rails the Philippine market lives on, with GCash, Maya and GrabPay accepted alongside cards.
• The coalition earns at Robinsons supermarkets and drugstores and now reaches into the trip itself through Go Hotels (a 3 out of 5 on Cross-Journey Integration).

Then there is the Super Pass. Six times, most recently in November 2024, Cebu Pacific has sold 99-peso open-dated flight vouchers by the million, and each run sold out. There is proven, repeated appetite for a committed, prepaid relationship with this airline. The mechanism for it sits dormant, and the loyalty program those flyers land in is built around retail rather than flying.

Cebu Pacific’s triangle has the flattest Access corner on the board (Anchor 2.0), an Unanchored Program in the plainest sense. Go Rewards is a capable retail coalition, and the relationship it builds accrues to the retail group rather than the carrier.

VietJet’s SkyJoy: The Inverted Commodity

VietJet is the only carrier here that built its own program, and nobody in this edition talks about loyalty with more ambition. SkyJoy‘s previous chief executive Sereen Teoh has said the goal is to become “the one stop loyalty gateway across the world”, and the reported numbers behind that ambition are substantial, with over 18 million members since the May 2023 launch, a coalition spanning Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, and an anchor role in the Sovico group’s ecosystem alongside HDBank.

On Access, SkyJoy has built more than the other two airlines in this article.

• It runs the edition’s only earned status ladder. Silver arrives at four one-way flights, Gold at ten brings priority check-in, boarding, and bag handling, and Diamond at thirty adds domestic lounge access (a 3 out of 5 on Priority and Early Access).
• Tier multipliers push earning up to twelve points per 10,000 dong on premium fares, and travelers in a hurry can skip the ladder and buy Gold outright as the Sky+ pass (a 3 out of 5 on Volume and Frequency Enablement).
• Members get a gated redemption product in fixed-point tickets, advertised at up to 70 percent below cash fares (a 2 out of 5 on Exclusive Inventory).

At 2.4, this is the strongest Access pillar in the edition.

On Control, the machinery turns opaque. Earn rates are published, but sprawl across a matrix of four tiers and four fare classes, and open-market redemptions float at roughly half a cent per point (a 2 out of 5 on Pricing Clarity). Eco fares are non-refundable with paid changes, and free date changes begin only at Deluxe (a 2 out of 5 on Flexibility and Cancellation).

On Convenience, the delivery collapses. VietJet’s booking app holds 1.9 stars on Google Play, the weakest airline app score in six editions, with reviewers describing duplicated inputs and pages that jump mid-booking (a 1 out of 5 on Digital User Experience, a 2 on Booking Simplicity). Communication fails under stress as well, most visibly in December 2025, when passengers sat more than four hours on a VietJet aircraft in Singapore without air-conditioning or clear updates, and in April 2025, when Vietnam’s aviation authority ordered an urgent inspection after complaints about delays announced without notice (a 1 out of 5 on Proactive Communication).

Between those two halves sits the widest ambition-to-execution gap the scorecard has measured. Eighteen million people joined a program whose airline still struggles to board them on time, keep them informed, and keep a booking flow working.

VietJet’s triangle is the first in six editions to stretch furthest on Access and fall away everywhere else (Anchor 2.1). An Unanchored Program of a new kind, an inverted commodity, where the rare thing (something real behind the login) exists and the everyday execution around it keeps falling short.

What the Asia-Pacific Diagnostic Tells Us

Strange as it sounds after three very different stories, all three ownership models arrive at the same verdict.

Control is table stakes across the group, just as it was in Turkey and the US. Nobody here differentiates on flexibility, an opening the first mover would have entirely to itself.

Access is still the aggregate weak point, averaging 1.7 across the board. The one carrier that leads on it is the one least able to deliver the basics around it.

Two numbers from earlier editions put all this in perspective. Wizz Air built the strongest Access the scorecard has seen in a low-cost carrier on memberships costing less than a checked bag, and none of these three, with a full coalition, a ten-million-member currency, and a retail empire behind them, comes near it. And Cebu Pacific has sold a million prepaid flight vouchers in a day six separate times, evidence of a committed relationship waiting to be built, while its loyalty investment sits in a retail coalition instead.

Whoever holds the program, none of the three has built the gated, member-only value an AI agent cannot scrape.

Next, the scorecard attempts a first. We take Europe’s three great airline groups, Lufthansa, Air France-KLM, and IAG, and score each one as if it were a single airline. On paper they look alike. Underneath, one runs a single loyalty program across every airline it owns, while another spreads one currency across four separate clubs, each with its own rules. Whether that difference shows up in the scores is the next edition’s question.

The ownership model turned out to matter less than what gets built inside it. The first carrier in this category to put something behind the login that travelers would miss will make all three of these triangles look dated.