The Disappearance of Brand Loyalty: A Rant

Why Companies Are Losing Touch with Their Customers and How It Affects Us All

Have you watched the Apple TV series Acapulco? It's a charming series set in a Mexican hotel, offering light entertainment when you need a break. Minor spoiler alert: at the beginning of the series, the hotel staff motto is "the guest gets what the guest wants." By the end, decades later, it's changed to "the guest gets what the guest qualifies for." It made me chuckle. Through travel hacking, I ensure you qualify for much more, but that’s a topic for another time.¹

Where I'm going with this is…

What's with all these brands not understanding customer loyalty anymore? To pick on one, I've used Bit.ly for link shortening for years—if not decades—until they recently decided I wasn’t paying enough and stripped away functionality to the point of making their app unusable.

After some frustration, and trying to make it work in a now broken app, I gave up. It took me (almost) half an afternoon to migrate my links to a self-hosted option. For free. And (again, almost) all my historic links still w…