Startup Stage: Passtination wants to help airlines extend loyalty programs

Passtination

Passtination was founded this year by CEO Safir Jamal, who also founded travel reward membership program Global Nomad Pass.

The startup is aimed at helping airlines connect loyalty programs with in-destination merchants, giving users an airline-branded wallet pass to unlock local discounts.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

We embed airline loyalty programs into the cities members visit, rewarding them with instant, member-only discounts at restaurants, hotels, fitness studios and experiences wherever they travel. Discounts are merchant-funded, with no technical integration required from the airline. The moments that define our travels happen on the ground—where members eat, stay, shop and explore. These are critical touchpoints to reinforce loyalty and influence the next booking. Today, most airline loyalty programs disappear the moment the plane lands, but we make sure they don't.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Business: Passtination sells a white-label, in-destination loyalty layer to airlines on an annual license basis. We can custom build and manage merchant networks for any airline, in whichever cities they choose. We deploy local teams to source, vet and onboard the merchants who fund the discounts. Each loyalty member gets a free trial pass, delivered straight to Apple or Google Wallet in seconds. At the end of the free trial, members can upgrade to a paid annual pass using cash or miles, and each of those upgrades is close to 100% margin for the airline—since merchants fund the underlying discount and the airline has already paid us our license fee.

Technology: Our platform runs a real-time analytics engine that captures every QR-code scan at the point of redemption and turns it into first-party behavioral data that airlines have never seen before: which merchants members actually visit, how often, in which city, etc. That data flows into a dashboard for the airline's loyalty and marketing teams, giving them visibility into ground-level member behavior.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

Strengths: We already operate Global Nomad Pass, a network of 500+ merchants across 25+ destinations, with members using their pass an average of three times daily. Our largest partnership, with Marketing Greece and Aegean Airlines, gives us a referenceable case study for when we sit down with prospective airlines.

Weaknesses: Bespoke, city-by-city merchant sourcing is a real operational cost that does not scale the way software usually scales.

Opportunities: Loyalty economics are shifting. Airlines increasingly treat their programs as standalone financial assets rather than marketing line items. Co-brand card issuers are also pushing airlines to make card value feel tangible, and an in-destination discount is one of the strongest ways to do that.

Threats: Airlines move slowly by nature, so our sales cycles are long. Budget planning, internal sign-off and procurement processes all move at a pace that determines how quickly we can bring on new airline partners.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspectives?

You land in a new city and are left piecing together where to eat, sleep or work out, with no connection back to the airline whose loyalty program got you there in the first place. Imagine instead if your airline guided you to a list of places nearby, each one handpicked by a local, where you got an instant discount just for being part of the airline's loyalty program. For the industry, that gap is a missed opportunity. Airlines have built loyalty programs that are very good at rewarding the flight and largely silent about everything that happens after landing. That silence is also a data gap: Airlines know a lot about how members fly and comparatively little about how they behave once they arrive.

Now that the product is built, what's your strategy for customer acquisition?

Our acquisition motion is direct, relationship-led sales into airline loyalty and ancillary revenue departments, since this product sits across both teams. We build a fully customized proposal for each airline around its specific member base, co-brand card and destination footprint.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

We didn’t start with Passtination. We started by building and operating Global Nomad Pass, which forced us to prove that the mechanic worked with real merchants and real redemption behavior. Once our Aegean Airlines partnership was live, other airlines began asking whether we could build the same model for them, but this time under their own brand. That inbound interest is what led us to build Passtination as a dedicated, white-label solution for airline loyalty.

How and when will you make money?

Our commercial model is based on airlines paying us a flat annual license fee: roughly $60,000 a year for a custom-built merchant network covering up to five cities. The fee is fixed and known up front, since merchants fund the discounts themselves. On top of that, airlines earn on every free-to-paid pass upgrade a member makes, in cash or miles, which is close to pure margin since the license fee they pay us already covers our costs.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Before Passtination, I spent several years as COO of Ford X in Silicon Valley, where I helped build a portfolio of 14 ventures that collectively generated more than $25 million in new revenue. Before that, I founded GilletteLabs inside Procter & Gamble and led the team behind the Heated Razor, after leading global strategy for Gillette's disposable razor portfolio for several years. I also co-founded the sports nutrition brand 1Shot Protein and later led go-to-market strategy at Definitive Intelligence, which was acquired by Groq.

Passtination itself grew out of Global Nomad Pass, the consumer membership I founded and still operate, which gave us the first-hand operating experience to build an airline-ready version of the same model at scale.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

Every merchant network is sourced city by city, in the language and cultural context of that destination, which means the work depends on genuine local expertise in Dublin, Bangkok or Mexico City. As we grow the team, we're carrying that same principle into hiring: bringing in people who reflect the geographies and cultures our merchant networks operate in.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Patience. Enterprise sales inside airlines move on a timeline shaped by budget cycles, procurement processes and internal approvals. Building a pipeline that can absorb that pace, while still moving quickly with the partners who are ready, has been the real operating discipline of the past year.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact. Why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?

Nothing about our product touches an airline's booking engine, loyalty ledger or app. It's a wallet pass and a merchant network layered on top of what already exists. We also don’t walk into airline meetings with simply a concept. We walk in with GNP already live and a real partnership running with Aegean Airlines.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

I expect Passtination to have moved several of our current airline conversations from contract into live, member-facing programs. Getting those first launches right, with strong redemption data to show for it, is what the next 12 months are really about.

What is your endgame? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)

Our goal is to build Passtination into the go-to infrastructure that airlines rely on to extend loyalty beyond the flight. Right now, we're focused on proving that at scale with multiple airlines. Once we've done that, we'll be in a strong position to decide whether the right path is continued independent growth or a strategic combination with a larger player in aviation, loyalty, payments or travel technology.