Media release

All hands to the pump – and quickly

AA SMARTFUEL programme goes from strength to strength

With half the country’s motorists signed up, a host of retail partners, $98.6 million of fuel savings, and an industry award – fuel rewards programme AA Smartfuel has plenty to celebrate as it turns two.

With its second birthday on 7 November, the innovative fuel savings programme, continues to go from strength to strength and now has more than 1.6 million unique registered cardholders – a number that’s growing, along with customer spend.

AA Smartfuel General Manager Ian Sutcliffe says the powerful customer proposition of ‘save money on fuel immediately’, along with the simplicity and flexibility of the programme are key attributes of success to date.

“There are almost 2000 places around New Zealand where fuel discounts can be earned simply by swiping either an AA Membership card or an AA Smartfuel card,” says Mr Sutcliffe.  “The simplicity of the programme has seen significant growth in customer numbers, millions in fuel savings for our cardholders and increased customer spend, which is great for participating retailers.”

New cardholders continue to join at a rate of around 15,000 per month, substantially higher than any other loyalty programme in the country.  And these efforts have seen AA Smartfuel recently pick up the best Consumer Products & Services award at the TVNZ NZ Marketing Awards.

It seems many of AA Smartfuel’s participating retailers are also enjoying the recognition.  Mark Brunton, Executive General Manager, Repco New Zealand says “AA Smartfuel provides Repco with a point of difference which offers our customers added value and is both an effective foot traffic and basket spend driver”, which complements our other marketing and promotional initiatives”.

This popularity and the programme’s scalability is providing results for both small community-based retailers and large multi-chain organisations. And, with hundreds of thousands of card-holders regularly enjoying 10 to 20 cent per litre savings on their fill-ups, many consumers are actively seeking participating retailers out so they can earn fuel savings.
Next steps for the AA Smartfuel team are to continue to grow the existing stable of retailers and further increase cardholder numbers.

“There are currently over 760,000 Kiwi households with an AA Smartfuel card – "that’s a lot of customers we’re engaging with regularly,” says Mr Sutcliffe.  “We’re looking forward to building on that, attracting more retailers, and continuing to offer our customers excellent retail deals and fuel savings.”

AA Smartfuel works best when cardholders swipe their card at every opportunity with participating retailers.  Every discount offered by a retailer is loaded on to the cardholder’s account, so the discount available increases with every swipe.  Cardholders then redeem their fuel discounts at over 350 BP and participating Caltex service stations nationwide.

A full list of participating retailers can be found at AAsmartfuel.co.nz

Ends

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