I am not talking about Aegean Gold which could be achieved with 20,000 miles of Star Alliance flight credits, that anyways changed this month onwards.

Back in August, Starbucks India finally launched the Starbucks Rewards program in India after building up their franchise over the past 2 years. It is a pretty simple program. Buy a Starbucks prepaid card, and register it at card. starbucks.in. There on, use the card to make payments for all your Starbucks across India. For Every 300 INR spent, you get 1 star. When you run out of credit, reload the same card. You can even have multiple cards on your account, like I have two added at the moment.

There are 3 tiers:

• Welcome: Free Size Upgrade on any beverage and a free tall drink in your birthday month.
• Green: Achieved with 5 stars, it gets you all the Welcome tier benefits, and adds a free beverage customisation.
• Gold: Achieved with 25 stars within 12 months (20 stars after being Green), you get all the Welcome and Green benefits, and two free beverage customisations, a personalised gold card, and free drink for every 10 stars. Even if you opted for an INR 150 drink, you are essentially getting a 5% payback which is a lot for a loyalty program.

Now, with Starbucks coming around, anyways they get all the prime locations and their competitors in India are fast getting out of sight. Additionally, at least they make some real nice Cappucinos which are my poison of choice. So, last night, I hit the Gold Tier after being a member for 2.5 months.

Ding! Lets see how many free drinks am I going to get over the months ahead. What I am really looking forward to, however is the special offers for Gold Members. For instance, just last weekend, there was a promotion where the Christmas drinks were up for buy-one-get-one-free. I’m assuming Bonus Stars would also be in the works.

Have you started looking into coffee loyalty yet?

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