One pass to rule them all…
The world is changed. It began with the forging of the great hotel digital keys. One key was given to the guest for their first stay, contactless, convenient, and quietly remarkable. Another key was given for the return visit. A third key for a conference stay. A fourth for a wedding. And with each new stay, each new digital key looked identical to the last: functional for a few nights, then dead at checkout. And then the stays and engagements that should not have been forgotten were lost. The guest history became legend. The digital keys became myth.
But they were all of them deceived, for the industry had mistaken access for a relationship. It had treated departure as a conclusion rather than a continuation. One by one, the free lands of hospitality fell to the digital key's power. But then something happened that digital keys did not intend.
The fellowship at Alliants reforged the digital keys into something new, bound not to a booking, but to the guest. Built to outlast the checkout. Forged not from a single stay, but from every stay. Not a key that expires, but a brand channel that persists. Not a credential that serves a booking, but a new means of engagement that outlasts it. One pass to rule them all, one pass to know them, one pass that brings all keys together and, in the wallet, binds them: The Member Pass.
In simple terms, via Apple Wallet, the Member Pass from Alliants is a subtype of the digital wallet pass, intended for loyalty and rewards programs, membership services, etc. What we did was combine the existing Member Pass and Multi-Reservation features in Apple Wallet to turn the digital room key into a persistent wallet pass that includes more detailed guest information and recognition, while also serving as a brand billboard on the guest’s phone.
After our Digital keys were recognised by TIME magazine for being one of the best innovations of 2025, we began beta testing Member Pass with select customers. Historically, every digital key in hospitality has been anchored to a PMS booking. We merely moved the anchor point. The Member Pass is tied to the guest profile in AXP (Alliants Experience Platform), not the PMS reservation, which means it exists before a booking is made, persists after checkout, and never expires because of the unified guest profiles that exist in the Core Platform of AXP.
Every future reservation the guest makes anywhere in the brand automatically attaches to the same pass, with room numbers, dates, and key credentials updating in real time without the guest needing to re-provision.
Alliants also built a new loyalty data model inside AXP, three tiers, ingesting membership data from any connected PMS, and wired it directly to the pass's card art, so a Gold-tier guest sees Gold artwork between stays, and the card updates the moment their tier changes. No melange of complex integrations is required; if the guest has a profile in AXP, the pass works. One profile. One pass. Every stay. All built on the Alliants Digital Keys module.
To put it plainly, a standard digital key grants access only to the room or area and expires at checkout. The Member Pass goes beyond access, becoming a permanent brand billboard on the guest’s phone, persisting in Apple Wallet between stays and displaying their loyalty tier, member number, and personalised brand card art.
Over 2 million digital hotel room keys have already been issued via Apple Wallet, covering more than 65,000 hotel rooms worldwide, according to Jennifer Bailey, VP of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet. That means 2 million “evergreen” brand engagement opportunities that leading hotel brands are already capitalising on by using Member Pass.
The longest-running example of the successful use of member pass functionality is Starbucks. It was one of the very first brands to integrate directly with Apple Passbook (the original name for Apple Wallet) at its launch alongside iOS 6 in September 2012. Only a month later, Starbucks officially launched the integration.
The Starbucks iPhone app was immediately modified to allow members to store their digital membership card in Passbook for quick, easy mobile payments. For context, Starbucks' mobile app had launched only in January 2011, yet had already processed more than 70 million transactions by the time of the Passbook integration's launch.
Users of the existing Starbucks mobile app tap "add to Passbook" to enable the capability, then swipe the Starbucks pass in Passbook on an iOS 6 device, which would display a barcode to the reader at the point of sale. This fundamentally shifted consumer mindsets in two ways:
Now consider the Starbucks rewards program that dominates inter-industry “leaderboards” on profitability. To make the story clear, we’ll compare active Starbucks rewards members with their share of total sales in the United States.
At present, there are over 34 million active Starbucks loyalty members in the US alone. At the beginning of 2025, membership was up 13% year-on-year. These kinds of loyalty members are 5.6x more likely to visit daily than non-members. To top it off, 57% of all U.S. Starbucks sales come from rewards members, with a majority of transactions originating from the digital wallet in their phones. One member passes to rule all coffee enthusiasts.
Starbucks figured out that by adopting member pass functionality, they could distil their entire app experience into a member pass that lives on the phone permanently while also reinforcing the loyalty tier, turning a daily transaction into a sustained brand relationship. Hotels have the same opportunity and the same data to back it up. The difference is that Starbucks built the persistent pass from day one. Hotels are still issuing a new key every stay. So what happens when you adopt member pass functionality into your digital key systems?
There is both long-term and short-term value to adopting member pass functionality for your digital key system at your hotel, but the immediate value is tangible for both guests and staff:
Oftentimes, hotels say that they know their guests. By how much, though? How well known does the loyal returning guest who gets handed a new key and a fresh welcome pack for the fourth time this year feel? Member Pass turns the mundane digital key on its head, making it a persistent recognition element. Just because they left the property doesn’t mean they left the brand behind too.
On every return, each guest arrives knowing they are known, not guessing if they are. The relationship doesn't reset at checkout. It just continues, like the circle of a gold ring.
If you want to find out how to adopt member pass functionality into your digital key solutions, give us a shout, and we’d be happy to talk!
