Sun Group Joins Vietnam’s Race To Own The Customer

The average consumer enrolls in eight loyalty programs and actively uses five, according to Deloitte research, and Vietnam is no exception to the fatigue. As far back as 2019, over half of Vietnamese consumers surveyed had already joined at least one program, yet most schemes remain what they have always been: a phone number recited at checkout, points that quietly expire. It is against this backdrop that Sun Group launched Sun Signature on the evening of July 14 at Ascott Tây Hồ in Hanoi, a program that consolidates the conglomerate's entire ecosystem, from aviation to real estate, onto a single platform built with Amadeus, Visa, and National Citizen Bank (NCB).

The mechanics: one account earns two currencies, Sun Points for redemption and tier points for status, across flights on Sun PhuQuoc Airways, Sun Group hotels and resorts, Sun World parks, golf courses, Sun Group Healthcare, and Sun Property transactions. Five tiers run from Member to Infinity, the latter requiring 8,000 tier points. Through NCB and Visa, points can be earned and spent at more than 1,600 merchants nationwide via QR payment. A co-branded NCB Visa card in four editions functions as both membership credential and payment card, usable at Visa's 175 million acceptance points globally, with an "Infinity Private" tier planned on Visa's new ultra-premium line.

Read one way, this is a press release. Read another, it is a data point in a structural shift worth watching. Vietnam's loyalty market is projected to reach $542 million in 2025, up 18.2% year on year, and nearly double to $971 million by 2029, per PayNXT360 research. The same analysts point to coalition programs, where multiple brands share one points pool, as the model gaining ground fastest, displacing the single-brand punch card. Sun Signature is textbook coalition strategy, and it is not the first: Vingroup consolidated VinFast, Vinhomes, Vinpearl, Vinschool, and Vinmec under VinClub in August 2024. Vietnam's two largest private conglomerates have now reached the same conclusion, that the customer relationship, not any single transaction, is the asset worth investing in.

Two features distinguish Sun Group's version. The first is the banking layer. By making the loyalty card a functioning Visa card, and by letting NCB's Signature Savings deposit product convert returns into points, the program blurs the line between loyalty and consumer finance. This mirrors a broader regional pattern: across Asia, the most durable loyalty ecosystems, from Rakuten in Japan to Shinhan's in Korea, are anchored in payments and banking rather than perks. The second is aviation. Sun PhuQuoc Airways announced direct international routes to Phú Quốc from Chengdu, Singapore, and Bangkok at the same event, and airline miles remain the only loyalty currency most consumers genuinely chase. A conglomerate that owns both the airline and the destination can close a loop that hotel chains and retailers cannot.

Government interest is also notable. Deputy Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Nguyễn Huy Dũng framed the launch less as a corporate perk scheme than as infrastructure, connecting tourism data, customer identification technology, and finance. That reading aligns with Vietnam's push toward a cashless economy, one of the forces analysts credit for the loyalty market's 20.7% annual growth between 2020 and 2024.

The open questions are real. Point accrual currently applies only to Sun PhuQuoc Airways flights and Sun Property customers, with other categories promised later, so the "unified ecosystem" is for now more architecture than experience. The program claims 53,600 members in its first month of registration, a respectable start but modest against incumbents like MoMo and VinID that count users in the tens of millions. And the global pattern is cautionary: consumers sign up easily and disengage just as easily. Coalition programs succeed when earning feels effortless and redemption feels valuable; they stall when points accumulate faster than reasons to spend them.

Still, the direction of travel is clear. Vietnam's loyalty landscape is consolidating from thousands of orphaned point schemes into a handful of ecosystem-scale platforms backed by banks, airlines, and data infrastructure. Whether Sun Signature executes remains to be seen. But the era of the plastic punch card in Vietnam is ending, and the question for every consumer brand without an ecosystem behind it is what they intend to do about it.