Overview
IAG Loyalty (IAGL), the loyalty division of International Airlines Group (IAG), manages programs such as Avios and works with travel and retail partners to create ecosystems where points can be collected and redeemed. A growing part of this offering is loyalty commerce, where customers can use Avios points to purchase products via IAGL's own online stores.
As part of this, IAGL launched The Wine Flyer, an online store built on BigCommerce that enabled customers to spend Avios points on wines, beers, and spirits, with delivery direct to their door. To power the store, a custom middleware application was developed on Google Cloud Platform to handle the exchange of loyalty points between the customer and the e-commerce platform, as well as to enable single sign-on with Avios accounts.
However, the middleware became a source of friction. Delays in point transfers, occasional missing balances, and the lack of real-time processing not only disrupted the customer journey but also placed additional strain on IAGL’s customer service teams. The architecture lacked resilience, scalability, and observability, making it unsuited to support IAGL’s long-term vision of expanding loyalty commerce across multiple storefronts and brands.
Following an architectural review, Leighton recommended replatforming the middleware on AWS using native, serverless services to improve reliability, resilience, and cost efficiency. After a successful replatforming of The Wine Flyer, IAGL extended this approach to the new Avios Shop, where the middleware was re-architected from the ground up to be fully brand-agnostic. This ensured it could serve as a central, scalable integration layer for additional storefronts and product ranges in the future, enabling IAGL to expand its loyalty commerce ecosystem with confidence.
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