Turn Your Loyalty Cost Center Into a Revenue Stream

01 /The Concept

Odynn helps companies and banks upgrade their loyalty programs by adding travel redemption – letting customers convert accumulated points into flights and hotel bookings.

As the startup argues, this change does two things: it boosts customer engagement, and it turns loyalty programs from a pure cost center into an actual revenue stream.

Here's the economics: a points program that converts rewards into discounts on future purchases essentially eats into the company's margins. But when a customer converts those same points into a flight or hotel stay, the company earns commissions from airlines and travel operators – creating an entirely new income stream.

Odynn's target customers are banks, the newer wave of Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) providers selling white-labeled financial products, co-branded credit card issuers, and corporate travel management companies.

The startup's travel marketplace is called Awayz and looks like a polished, full-featured travel booking experience.

It can be embedded into a partner's website or app in a matter of days – the integration is just a set of API calls dropped into the right places. Despite that simplicity, Awayz is a complete marketplace with AI-powered personalization built in.

For partners, the go-to-market timeline shrinks from 18 months of custom development to 2–8 weeks, with upfront development costs dropping by 95%. They also hand off ongoing maintenance and marketplace development to Odynn entirely.

Of course, there's a fee for access – either a standard rate (discussed case by case) or a custom arrangement that includes dedicated technical support.

Odynn modestly describes itself as "the AI-powered Shopify for loyalty and travel" But the self-promotion is backed by results: early bank clients have seen 108% increases in customer engagement and reached loyalty program profitability within months of launch.

Odynn shipped a hotel-comparison-only version of Awayz in 2023, funded by a couple of angel rounds. Flight search came in 2024, alongside a $2.5M raise. The current full platform was built from that foundation and has now closed a $9.5M round.

02 /Why It Matters

A comparable story played out at Unravel, which launched a travel marketplace in 2022 and raised $1.25M in 2023.

Unravel's original concept was "TikTok for travel" – a short-video feed where creator partners showcased destinations, with users booking flights and hotels directly from the clips and creators earning commissions. The format was compelling in theory but didn't break through in practice – so last year Unravel pivoted.

It started selling its travel marketplace directly to banks and telecom operators under the same embedded model as Odynn – letting those companies plug the Unravel marketplace into their own loyalty programs, white-labeled. The pivot immediately attracted $7M in new investment, with former senior executives from Booking.com among the backers.

That B2B model proved far more tractable than competing head-to-head with established booking platforms, even with the novelty of video. Unravel kept the video layer anyway, citing 4x higher user engagement and 10x better booking conversion compared to static listings.

Unravel's current pitch: "the fastest way to embed a travel marketplace into your own app, under your own brand."

There's a parallel insight from Superlogic ([related review](/review/hochesh-imet-lojalnyh-klientov-dari-im-jemocii)), which argues that pure discount-based loyalty programs are losing their appeal. Its counter-thesis: "The future of customer engagement is experiences."

Superlogic has built a catalog of experiences that are genuinely hard to access through normal channels – courtside seats at playoff games, VIP concert access, behind-the-scenes Broadway tours, private dinners with celebrity chefs. The catalog is sold to companies for inclusion in their loyalty programs, under the same B2B model as Odynn and Unravel. Superlogic has raised roughly $40M in total, with a convertible note closed last autumn after the review was published.

03 /Opportunities

The broadest takeaway from today's review: don't think about how you can earn money – think about how someone else can earn money with your help.

In this case, "someone else" means companies with large existing customer bases that could be generating additional revenue from those customers but don't want to own the complexity of building and maintaining the product layer required to do it. If you arrive with a solution they can plug in quickly, cheaply, and without distraction – the conversation practically closes itself.

Gigs ([related review](/review/luchshe-stat-uspeshnym-svodnikom-chem-neudavshimsja-izobretatelem)) illustrates the same model in a different vertical: $97M raised to let any company become a mobile carrier for its own customers. Gigs isn't a carrier – it aggregates third-party network capacity, packages it inside its platform, and sells that platform to companies as a configurable toolkit for building their own mobile service offerings.

So: what category of third-party services could you aggregate and package into a platform that enables other companies to quickly, simply, and effortlessly start monetizing their existing customer bases?

The critical factor: the services need to sell themselves – meaning they should meet a natural, widespread demand that customers will fulfill wherever it's most convenient and cost-effective. Nobody should need to be convinced that they want these services.