Three months of premium tier data changed how we think about discounts

We thought the fee cut would be the hook

The logic seemed airtight. Free users pay 8 to 10 per cent on top of ticket and flight prices. Premium members pay 4 to 5 per cent. It's objectively better. We'd run the numbers; on a £200 flight, a premium member saves £10 to £12 per ticket. On an event ticket, sometimes more. We figured people would do the same maths Zara did, see the annual breakdown (£59.99 a year vs potentially £40, £50, £80 saved across a dozen bookings), and think it was obvious.

What we missed was the friction. Flash deals are, by definition, rare. A user might find three genuinely decent flights or events in a month, one in another month, then nothing for six weeks. If you're paying monthly, that's seven quid with nothing to show for it. Annual felt like a hedge against luck. And that's a different purchase decision entirely.

The real difference was deal alerts and early access

Three months in, our retention data told a different story than our pitch deck had. Members-only deals and early access weren't marketing fluff. They were the actual reason people stayed. A user in Manchester kept her subscription because she caught a Coldplay ticket forty minutes before it sold out. Someone else flagged a return flight to Edinburgh for £34 that only appeared for premium members. That feeling of being ahead of it, of seeing something before the general free tier could, mattered more than the small percentage discount on the transaction itself.

The deal alerts function helped too. Users who set saved searches and got notifications when flights or events matching their criteria dropped showed three times higher engagement in their second month. It wasn't about saving money on a single booking. It was about not having to check the app constantly. That's worth seven quid.

Conversion and retention aren't the same problem

We'd confused two distinct customer moments. Getting someone to upgrade initially is partly about discounts, yes. But keeping them subscribed is almost entirely about whether they feel they're in the loop. We'd spent launch week focused on making the fee saving sound dramatic enough to convert free users, then shipped early access and members-only deals as secondary benefits. Backwards, it turned out.

What actually happened: free users converted when they trusted they'd see better deals before others. And they stayed when that kept happening. The four-point-five per cent discount was a rounding error. It was the twenty-minute head start that made the subscription feel worth it. Zara had done the mental math correctly. She just did it on incomplete information.

How we recalibrated

After that first quarter, we stopped talking about the fee reduction as the primary benefit. Not because it wasn't real, but because it wasn't why people actually stayed. In our app onboarding, in our marketing, in every conversation with a potential member, we led with alert speed and exclusivity. We made sure members knew when they'd caught something no one else had seen yet.

We also made the annual option feel smarter by bundling. The maths worked better over twelve months, but more importantly, it signalled commitment from us. If you're betting on finding good deals, a year felt like the right time frame. And it reduced churn from users who got frustrated in month two when no premium-exclusive flights appeared.

Pro members, the ones paying £14.99 a month for zero buyer fees, surprised us least. That tier worked because it attracted power users who book frequently enough that the fee elimination actually did add up. A user booking four or five times a month immediately saw the value. We didn't need to convince them about early access. They just cared that their transaction costs went away.

What this taught us about the product

Here's the uncomfortable part: we'd designed premium membership around a benefit that didn't emotionally land. A percentage discount on a flight booking is rational. It makes sense. But people don't stay subscribed because of sense. They stay because they feel smarter than they did before, because they caught something good, because they're not missing out. Early access and members-only deals deliver exactly that feeling. The fee cut is just what you get in exchange for your money, not what makes you feel like you made the right choice.

It's shifted how we think about new features now. Every addition gets the same question: does this make a member feel like they're inside something? Or is it just a number that improves incrementally? The difference turns out to be everything.