Odynn Wants to Make Loyalty Worth Something to Travellers Again

An interview with John Taylor by Sean Murphy

A traveller can rack up two decades of stays at the same hotel chain and still, when it matters, find themselves with nothing. John Taylor has heard the complaint quite often since 2021, loyal customers who discovered that loyalty was only ever running one way. Loyalty points scattered across half a dozen airline accounts, a banking app, a couple of online travel agents and almost none of these points providing any real value in isolation. The problem is not that people lack rewards, it is that the rewards have become increasingly difficult to use.

Taylor, the founder of Odynn, has spent the better part of a decade circling this frustration. His first attempt was Card Curator, a consumer app launched in 2018 to help people optimise their points and miles. Demand was never the issue; it reached 40,000 monthly active users and proved there was real appetite in a market he calls fragmented and opaque. What it taught him, painfully and by his own admission, was that his team did not know how to market to consumers.

Then Covid delayed the full launch by years, and when airlines and hotels shifted to dynamic loyalty pricing in late 2021, the move broke the app's recommendation engine. The published award charts consumers had relied on disappeared overnight.

Rather than rebuild, Taylor decided to start again. If dynamic pricing made the consumer's task harder, it made the case for selling to the institutions issuing loyalty points far stronger. So Odynn was built again from the ground up, this time as infrastructure. Taylor describes it as a Shopify for travel portals: a modular platform that lets banks and fintechs build their own embedded travel offering, personalised from the top down by customer segment and from the bottom up by the individual cardholder. The same institution can serve a high-net-worth client chasing luxury and a budget traveler hunting cheap flights.

At its centre sits something Odynn calls Traveler DNA, a single layer pulling together a user's accounts across airlines, hotels and banks. From there it can price a flight not only in dollars but in the user's actual Avios balance and intuitively move points between programs to top up a booking that would otherwise fall short.

The obvious question, the one Taylor says he is asked constantly, is why the banks do not simply build this themselves. His answer is that some banks have similar programs but they never built one themselves. American Express Travel is a wrapper on Expedia. Chase Travel is a roughly nine-billion-dollar amalgamation of acquired companies. Capital One, which Taylor rates as perhaps the most technically capable major bank on the planet, bought its travel portal out of Hopper rather than build one. If Capital One will not build a portal in-house, he reasons, no other bank has any business trying.

The economics are what make the pitch work, particularly in Europe. Without the interchange revenue that funds American rewards programmes, European banks have long struggled to pay out anything generous. A travel portal changes the maths. Commissions on bookings run at six to eight percent, Taylor says, leaving room to fund rewards several times richer than a rival offering half a point per euro spent, while still turning a profit. The contrast he wants European fintechs to notice is stark: pay out five times the points and still make money.

Taylor is candid about where the market is heading. Travel is growing at around 14 percent a year, but the growth is uneven. He splits the market into three: online travel agents, embedded travel, and supplier-direct bookings made straight with the airline or hotel. Only one of the three is shrinking, the online agents, while embedded and supplier-direct both take share. Because around three-quarters of Odynn's bookings go supplier-direct, Taylor argues the platform sits on the right side of both growing segments at once. He expects travellers will increasingly begin a trip with an AI assistant, then book wherever their loyalty pays out best, which for most people means their bank or fintech rather than an agent. The institutions that own that moment own the relationship.

Which returns to the question underneath all of it. The hotel that treats the twenty-year guest the same as everybody else, the airline that devalues the miles it once promised; if the providers are not loyal to their loyal customers, Taylor asks, why should the customers be loyal back? His wager is that the banks and fintechs now buying his infrastructure can answer that better than the airlines and hotels ever did, turning points people had written off into something that actually adds value to their travel experience and helps them cut costs. The days of loyalty spread thin across a dozen accounts, Odynn is betting, are coming to an end.