Loyalty Status Co

Accelerating growth — Loyalty Status Co scales and secures its international client base with the Cloudflare connectivity cloud, saving up to $18 for every dollar spent

Founded by a trio of former airline executives, Loyalty Status Co is revolutionizing how the airline, hospitality, and loyalty industries engage and retain customers. Since its inception in 2020, the company has forged an extensive network of partnerships with the world's most recognizable airline, hotel, and retail brands.

As the creators of powerful customer acquisition tools like the StatusMatch, StatusBooster subscription, StatusLift, and GetStatus card-match platforms, Loyalty Status Co has been featured in major media like the New York Times, Condé Nast, WSJ, and CNN Travel. The company has also received industry-based recognition as the World Aviation Festival Start-Up winner and Loyalty and Awards Innovation Supplier of the Year finalist.

Building a robust, scalable, user-friendly, and centrally managed global infrastructure

In three short years, Loyalty Status Co transitioned from a startup into the preferred loyalty and rewards program partner for major international airlines and hotel chains. Operating in a highly regulated industry reliant on consumer data and personally identifiable information (PII) to deliver services, the company’s rapid growth created a host of challenges for its IT and security teams. These challenges focused on ensuring a secure and responsive user experience for its expanding roster of partners and their program members.

“As our company expanded and we partnered with some globally recognizable airlines, our network, infrastructure, and performance capabilities had to grow, and fast,” explains Mark Sly, Loyalty Status Co’s CTO. “Data security was our paramount concern. We needed to secure user information, automate complex security tasks, and optimize our services while aligning with stringent industry security standards, including ISO 27001 certification.”

After an unsuccessful experiment using an AWS solution and custom code to achieve its goals, Loyalty Status Co turned to Cloudflare to secure and protect its digital environments. Unlike its prior attempts, Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud offered the company a consolidated solution with a single control plane to help it accomplish the following objectives:

• Align with the international security standards governing its airline and travel industry partners.
• Mitigate evolving online security threats to secure application and customer data.
• Ensure the reliability and speed of customer applications.
• Adapt to the diverse technology stacks and requirements of its international client base.

“All of our early approaches lacked scalability and were a challenge to manage globally. They didn't have the comprehensive features we needed, and that increased our development overheads,” says Sly. “With the airline and travel industry facing daily data security and privacy threats, our need for a scalable, user-friendly alternative with robust features and centralized management drove our transition to Cloudflare.”

Solution: Securing and scaling digital environments with Cloudflare

Loyalty Status Co immediately recognized the benefits of using Cloudflare to protect both its clients’ and its own public infrastructure. Transitioning to Cloudflare, the company was able to support rapid business growth, seamlessly securing the loyalty program domain and applications of Frontier Airlines, its first major airline partner.

“From the beginning, Cloudflare’s user-friendly interface and built-in features streamlined the adoption process,” says Sly. “As we increased in size, revenue, and value to our clients, our requirements changed and our infrastructure matured. Cloudflare became a critical infrastructure partner by enabling that growth.”

Aligning with international security standards and securing customer confidence

Providing software as a service (SaaS) in the data-sensitive loyalty services and consumer travel space, Loyalty Status Co relies on the trust of its airline partners. Obtaining ISO/IEC 27001 Certification, the global standard for information security management, was pivotal in building that trust and driving the company’s growth within the travel industry. Cloudflare played a key role in identifying and addressing security risks and weaknesses within Loyalty Status Co’s infrastructure, aligning with the rigorous requirements for certification. “Cloudflare has helped both directly and indirectly with our ISO 27001 journey, especially the process of educating our organization and bringing our network up to industry standards,” says Sly. “Our partnership with Cloudflare increases our airline clients’ confidence. They understand the level of security Cloudflare delivers, and that saves us time on reviews and audits.”

Adapting to diverse technology requirements across a diverse international client base

Cloudflare for SaaS has allowed Loyalty Status Co to leverage the entire suite of performance and security tools in the connectivity cloud to deliver fast, secure, centrally managed, and reliable experiences to its clients and their end users on a global scale. Alongside a fortified security position and immediate scalability, Cloudflare also enables Loyalty Status Co to offer customized tech stacks and adapt to regional differences — all without diluting performance and security or adding to development and administrative overheads.

“As a centralized, intuitive platform for testing and deploying solutions, Cloudflare saves us time and money,” says Sly. “Cloudflare’s user-friendly interface and pre-built features streamline our processes, eliminating the need for extensive custom development. This agility allows us to deploy effective solutions quickly, enhancing operational efficiency and reducing associated costs.”

Sly estimates that for every dollar Loyalty Status Co spends on Cloudflare services, it saves $18 through automation and resource allocation improvements — a very significant ROI of 1800%.

“Because all of Cloudflare’s products are easy to use, vendor management was much less of a burden, especially in our startup phase,” he says. “All Cloudflare products are vertically integrated in a single place, so stuff just works.”

Mitigating evolving online security threats to secure application and customer data

Leveraging Cloudflare for SaaS across its entire customer base, Loyalty Status Co secures customer applications and APIs across multiple threat scenarios using the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF), Advanced Rate Limiting, and DDoS protection from a single control plane. Cloudflare mitigates malicious traffic by proactively identifying and blocking high-risk

online activity using multi-layered protections. These include threat intelligence feeds, security analytics, sensitive data detection, machine learning, and managed and custom rulesets.

Implementing Cloudflare mitigated 99% of bot-generated threats to Loyalty Status Co’s infrastructure and customer applications.

“Cloudflare's robust security features provide Loyalty Status Co and our customers a comprehensive shield against evolving cyber threats and harmful traffic,” says Sly. “That not only improves our security posture, it ensures our services are always available.”

Improving application uptime and performance worldwide

Cloudflare's global content delivery network (CDN) and load balancing are also pivotal to maintaining the availability and application performance of Loyalty Status Co services. In a business ecosystem characterized by high-demand promotions, Cloudflare solutions provide the performance, reliability, and uptime crucial to a seamless, interruption-free user experience.

“Cloudflare is invaluable in overcoming the multifaceted challenges of ensuring data security, enhancing speed and service reliability, and adapting to the dynamic nature of our business,” says Sly. “By drastically reducing the loads to our origin servers, Cloudflare allows us to confidently launch large marketing campaigns for multiple clients without worrying about our infrastructure.”

Cloudflare application performance solutions have reduced the company's bandwidth consumption by more than 73% while substantially improving global performance and availability. Cloudflare Waiting Room ensures a fair and efficient experience for Loyalty Status Co users by dynamically managing queues and preventing server outages during high-demand events. This ensures customers stay informed and engaged, reducing the chances of process abandonment and lost business.

“Cloudflare is a strategic asset that translates into tangible business benefits,” says Sly. “Our enhanced site speed and application performance in Africa was key to our Innovation Supplier of the Year award and the ability to handle the increased volume from email campaigns without compromising the user experience prevents revenue loss and improves customer satisfaction for all our clients.”

The future with Cloudflare

Building on its successes using Cloudflare to scale the business and manage a growing list of international airlines and hotel chains, Loyalty Status Co, plans to expand its use of Cloudflare email security products like domain management Cloudflare DMARC Management to improve visibility and protect its users against social engineering and spoofing.

Reflecting on his company’s Cloudflare journey, Sly concludes: “Cloudflare's people and support have been nothing short of extraordinary. Their quick response times and in-depth knowledge have not only resolved issues promptly but have also showcased a level of commitment that sets them apart. It's a partnership built on trust and reliability. Don’t run your internet-based business without Cloudflare.”