Klout In The Airport: A High Score Gets You Into Cathay Pacific's SFO Lounge
Last month, Klout launched its iPhone app. Today, it's announcing its first big mobile partnership, one that should make app pretty appealing to any air travelers in San Francisco.
Context & Ripple Effects
San Francisco International has been the recurring testbed for mobile travel tech in this corpus — from an early SFO-focused airport app in late 2010 to CardStar folding Foursquare check-ins into loyalty cards — so an airline tying a physical privilege to a social metric fits an established pattern at this airport.
For Klout specifically, the partnership is a counterpunch to a growing credibility problem: commentary in October 2011 argued nobody cares about Klout scores anymore, and scrutiny in April 2012 questioned what the scores actually measure. Converting a high score into something tangible — Cathay Pacific lounge access via the newly launched iPhone app — is the company betting that perks, not the number itself, are what make the metric matter. The pickup across Gizmodo, VentureBeat, AllTwitter and others shows the stunt traveled well beyond TechCrunch's own readership.
First-order effects
- Travelers passing through San Francisco with high Klout scores gain a concrete new benefit — entry to Cathay Pacific's lounge — giving Klout's month-old iPhone app an immediate reason to be opened before a flight.
- Cathay Pacific gets a low-cost marketing channel at a hub where it competes against carriers with larger US footprints, trading lounge seats for word-of-mouth from self-selected influencers.
Second-order effects
- Other airlines and hospitality brands face pressure to treat third-party social scores as a perks currency alongside their own loyalty tiers, since Cathay has shown a non-airline metric can gate premium space.
- Klout's rivals in influence measurement must either match the perks model or cede the 'score you can spend' ground, shifting competition from score accuracy toward redemption value.
Third-order effects
- If brand-perks deals become standard, social scoring hardens into infrastructure for real-world access decisions — a shift from measuring influence to enforcing it, with all the fairness and gaming questions that April 2012's scrutiny of what the scores mean implies.
- Airlines' loyalty economics start absorbing outside data sources, weakening the closed-loop model where status was earned only through miles flown and fares paid.
The trend: Social influence scores are being converted into spendable real-world privileges, as brands like Cathay Pacific turn third-party metrics into gatekeepers for physical perks.