Cloudbeds & Journey launch shared hotel loyalty network

Cloudbeds and Journey have formed a strategic partnership for hotels in the Cloudbeds Collection, creating a shared loyalty network for independent properties.

The arrangement will integrate Journey's loyalty system into the Cloudbeds platform, allowing participating hotels to offer a common rewards currency across the collection while keeping their own branding and guest relationships.

The move targets a long-standing weakness for independent hotels, which often struggle to match the scale of loyalty schemes offered by large chains and online travel agencies. Those programmes can steer repeat bookings toward big brands and third-party platforms, leaving smaller operators with less direct contact with guests.

Under the partnership, hotels in the Cloudbeds Collection will be able to use rewards designed to encourage travellers to book directly rather than through commission-based intermediaries. The system will also draw on guest data and behavioural insights to help hotels tailor offers and stays.

Cloudbeds provides software that hotels use to manage operations, distribution and guest-facing functions. Its system is used by tens of thousands of properties in more than 150 countries, giving the arrangement a potentially broad base if collection members adopt the loyalty offering.

Journey, launched in 2025, focuses on loyalty and guest recognition for independent hotels and private residences. Its model allows operators to participate in a wider rewards network without giving up control of their brand or customer data to a parent group.

Direct booking focus

A key feature of the partnership is its emphasis on direct booking channels. Hotels will be able to offer Instant Rewards and Experience Multipliers through those channels, giving guests a reason to bypass online travel agencies.

That matters because commissions charged by some booking platforms can weigh heavily on hotel margins, particularly for smaller operators with less marketing reach. Large branded groups have historically countered that pressure through loyalty schemes that keep travellers within their own ecosystems.

Cloudbeds and Journey are positioning the shared network as an alternative to that model. Rather than joining a chain or soft brand, independent hotels would remain under their own names while participating in a broader commercial framework.

The partnership also includes a conversational guest interface called Known by Journey, intended to help hotels gather information on travel preferences and guest expectations before and during a stay.

Data and control

Guest data has become increasingly important for hotel operators as repeat business and personalised marketing gain value. In traditional franchise and soft-brand arrangements, control over customer relationships can sit partly with the parent brand, limiting a property's ability to market directly to past guests.

The companies said their model is designed so hotels retain control of that relationship. They also contrasted the structure with franchise systems that can involve fees tied to branding, marketing and loyalty programmes.

Rafael Blanes, Chief Growth Officer at Cloudbeds, set out the case for the partnership in a launch statement.

"Guest experience has never mattered more," Blanes said.

"The Cloudbeds Collection has always represented properties with real ambition, the kind that want to deliver something distinctive, on their own terms. Through our partnership with Journey, we're giving those hoteliers the intelligence and infrastructure to turn every stay into a reason to come back, and to compete with anyone on the experience they deliver."

For Journey, the agreement is also a bet that independent hotels want collective scale without the rules that often come with joining a larger brand system. The company argues that loyalty no longer needs to be tied to standardised properties and corporate ownership of guest engagement.

John Sutton, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Journey, described the partnership as a break with that trade-off.

"For fifty years, an independent hotel could only get chain-scale loyalty by giving up what made it independent. That tradeoff is over," Sutton said.

"With Cloudbeds, we are giving the world's best independent hotels the commercial power of a global brand while they keep their identity, their guests, and their soul. This is how the Independent Super-Brand gets built. The chains taught the world to stay in the same room over and over. We reward people for choosing the places worth remembering, and for the first time, independents set the terms."