Avolta's 20-Million-Member Loyalty Program Redefines Travel Dining

Avolta now runs more than 5,000 restaurants across 70 countries under 250 brands, and its Club Avolta loyalty program has grown to 20 million members since launching in 2024. That scale is exactly what the Swiss-Italian operator said it wanted when Dufry merged with Autogrill three years ago, and it's now paying off in data, technology and negotiating power.

The company earned the Globies Award from Informa Connect for franchise excellence, and the mechanics behind that award show how Avolta operates differently from typical franchisees.

Who is Avolta, exactly?

The company formed three years ago, when Swiss retailer Dufry merged with Italian travel operator Autogrill. The combined entity set out to redefine how travelers are served with restaurant and retail experiences under one roof.

Its holdings include HMS Host, the Maryland-based operator, plus franchise and license agreements with some of the biggest chains in the business: McDonald's, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Burger King, Chili's, California Pizza Kitchen, Tim Hortons and Shake Shack. Local and regional brands fill out the portfolio, including Eataly and Cousins Subs.

That mix — global chains plus local names — lets Avolta match its offerings to each airport, highway plaza and terminal it serves.

What does Club Avolta actually change?

The loyalty program is the clearest example of Avolta building tools that usually belong to brands, not operators. Club Avolta launched in 2024 and works at the company's duty-free stores, retail outlets and restaurants alike. That cross-channel reach gives Avolta a dataset on frequent travelers that virtually no single restaurant brand can replicate.

Membership has grown consistently since launch and now stands at 20 million. CEO Xavier Rossinyol told analysts and investors in July, according to a transcript on AlphaSense: "It's not just the size of the program. It's also the quality, the progressive improvement on the quality of data we get from Club Avolta."

Better data means better menu engineering, pricing and merchandising decisions across locations. For a company operating 250 brands, understanding which travelers buy what — and where — matters more than any single menu item.

Cameras, stablecoins and hybrid formats

Loyalty data explains what customers buy. Avolta also uses camera analytics inside its stores to understand why customers don't buy, so it can adjust store layout and offerings to remove friction at the point of sale.

The company is testing two other innovations:

• Hybrid restaurant-retail formats, blending dining and shopping in single locations
• Stablecoin payments at a duty-free shop at Zurich Airport

The stablecoin test is the more radical of the two. A stablecoin is cryptocurrency tied to an asset, and it would let consumers pay retailers directly without a bank or credit card company in the middle. If the pilot scales, it could cut payment processing costs — a real margin lever for an operator with thousands of points of sale.

Scale as a hedge

Rossinyol has also framed the company's size as protection against geopolitical risk, which directly affects travel volumes and therefore sales. Asked earlier about the potential impact of volatility on the business, he said: "We are more resilient than the other companies in our industry, because of our size."

That argument holds up on the numbers. An operator spread across 70 countries, 250 brands and both retail and dining doesn't lean on any single market or consumer behavior.

The next test is whether Avolta can convert its data advantage and payment experiments into measurable margin gains across those 5,000 locations.