The earn side is everything that credits the member: accrual on spend, bonuses on specific products or behaviors, promotions, and partner earn in ecosystem programs. The burn side is everything the currency buys: flights, room nights, merchandise, discounts, status accelerators, experiences. Members judge the program almost entirely at the burn moment, because that is where the currency turns into something real.
The loop breaks in predictable ways. If earning is slow, members never accumulate enough to care. If burning is hard, high thresholds, blackout rules, thin catalogs, balances pile up as liability while engagement decays. Programs tune earn rates, redemption pricing, and catalog breadth continuously to keep the loop turning.
In an ecosystem program the loop runs across partners: a member earns at the grocer and burns with the airline. That multiplies the places value can enter and leave the program, and it makes rule configuration and partner settlement part of the same design problem.
How GRAVTY handles this: earn and burn logic in GRAVTY is authored in the patented Visual Rules engine and offers are built in Offer Studio, so loyalty teams change earn rates and redemption rules without a development cycle.
