What Loyalty Members Actually Spend vs. Everyone Else

A guest enrolled in a loyalty program doesn't just come back slightly more often. Industry research shows loyalty members visiting roughly 22% more often and spending about 38% more per visit than guests who never enrolled, and roughly two-thirds of consumers say they order more often specifically because they're an active member somewhere.

The Actual Numbers

• Loyalty members visit roughly 22% more often than non-members.
• Loyalty members spend about 38% more per visit than non-members.
• Around 66% of consumers say they order more often from restaurants where they're an active loyalty member.
• Repeat diners overall spend about 27% more than first-time diners, with or without a formal loyalty program.

Read together, these figures suggest two separate effects stacking on top of each other: simply becoming a repeat guest raises spend on its own, and formal loyalty enrollment adds a further increase on top of that baseline repeat-guest effect, rather than the two numbers overlapping or explaining each other away.

Why This Gap Exists

Enrollment itself is a signal of intent to return, and a visible reward waiting to be claimed gives a guest an extra reason to choose the same vendor again rather than trying somewhere new.

There's also a practical mechanism at work beyond simple intent: a guest who's already partway toward a reward, three stamps into a ten-stamp card, for instance, has a concrete reason to place one more order here rather than switch to a competitor and lose that progress. The closer a guest gets to the reward threshold, the stronger that pull tends to become.

What This Means for a Typical Check

Applied to a vendor with a $35 average order, a non-member might place that order occasionally, while a loyalty member ordering 22% more often and spending 38% more per visit would be placing roughly $48 orders at a meaningfully higher frequency. Across a base of even a few hundred repeat guests, that gap compounds into a substantial share of total monthly revenue coming from the smaller group who actually enrolled.

That concentration is worth sitting with directly: a relatively small enrolled group can end up responsible for a disproportionate share of total revenue, which is exactly why growing enrollment itself, not just running the program passively, deserves real attention as a growth lever in its own right.

Simply mentioning the program at checkout, rather than assuming guests already know it exists, is often the single most direct way to grow that enrolled group without any added cost or complexity.

How AUANI Handles This

AUANI's punch-card loyalty program is included on every tier at no added cost, giving any vendor, regardless of size, a way to capture this spending gap without building a program from scratch.

Because the program requires no separate fee to run, the entire spending gap described in this research is available to a vendor to capture without first needing to weigh the program's cost against its expected return, since there is no added cost to weigh in the first place.

That removes what's often the biggest barrier to trying a loyalty program at all: the uncertainty of whether it will pay for itself. With no cost to weigh against the potential upside, there's little reason for a vendor of any size to leave this gap uncaptured.

A vendor that's been hesitant to start a loyalty program simply because setting one up felt like a project can treat this data as a reasonable nudge, since the research suggests the return tends to be worth the modest effort involved.

For more on turning first orders into repeat ones, see the marketing & repeat orders guide, and for the wider trend picture, see the Industry trends & data guide.