A Gift Card for Main Street: Three Ways Local-First Rewards Can Transform Incentive, Tourism and Event Programs
A New Differentiator for IRR and Loyalty Companies
Helping Tourism Organizations Turn Visitors Into Local Customers
A More Flexible Approach to Event Dine-arounds
Turning Local Choice Into a Scalable Reward
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For decades, the business gift card market has been dominated by national restaurants, retailers, travel companies, and other familiar brands. Nicole Glass, co-founder of Gift Card Market, Kansas City, believes there is an opportunity to complement those choices with something much more personal: a gift card connected to a recipient’s favorite neighborhood restaurants, spas, attractions, entertainment venues, or service providers.Glass says Gift Card Market’s patent-protected technology is designed to make local gift cards available nationally and at scale without requiring incentive, rewards, recognition, and loyalty companies to build and continually maintain millions of individual merchant relationships and SKUs.
According to Glass, the platform can dynamically present local establishments based on a recipient’s location, supported by geographic data, business reviews, and location-specific artificial intelligence. Available categories can include restaurants, spas and salons, entertainment, home services, automotive services, personal services, attractions, and amusement parks.
She says the platform’s ability to offer access to more than 12 million local establishments creates three particularly promising applications: differentiated rewards for IRR and loyalty companies, community-support programs for tourism organizations, and localized dine-arounds and gifting for meetings and motivational events.
A New Differentiator for IRR and Loyalty Companies
Incentive, rewards, recognition, and loyalty companies face an ongoing challenge: how to offer something truly different when many providers have access to essentially the same national gift cards.
Glass says Gift Card Market gives these companies the ability to add a distinctive new category—rewards tied to the businesses and places participants already know and value. Instead of receiving another general-purpose dining card, an employee could select a family-owned restaurant where birthdays are celebrated. A channel partner could choose a neighborhood spa, while a loyalty-program member could redeem for a favorite entertainment venue, home service, or automotive provider.
“The opportunity is to make the recipient’s favorite local places as easy to offer as the largest national brands,” Glass says. “Local businesses have always had tremendous emotional relevance, but they have been extremely difficult to provide at scale.”
According to Glass, the technology essentially creates the gift card when the recipient makes a selection. This reduces the need for an IRR or loyalty company to establish, load, and continuously update an enormous database of individual local merchant SKUs.
Cindy Willis, Product Manager at Maritz, previously told RRN that the emotional connection is one of the concept’s important differentiators. Participants can select businesses with which they already have personal relationships—something that a conventional national catalog may not be able to duplicate. Maritz began introducing the solution to clients in late 2025 and reported early interest from corporate buyers seeking more personalized and experience-oriented rewards.
Glass says the delivery process can also be personalized. Depending on the application, cards can be sent immediately by text or email, scheduled for a future occasion, or sent to a known contact through an existing text stream. She says Gift Card Market generally offers margins well above average for the IRR field, although economics can vary based on the client and opportunity.
For IRR and loyalty providers, Glass believes the combination of local choice, expanded categories, enhanced delivery, reduced SKU maintenance, and potentially attractive economics can provide a meaningful competitive distinction.
Helping Tourism Organizations Turn Visitors Into Local Customers
Tourism boards, destination marketing organizations, chambers of commerce, and business improvement districts generally share a common objective: attracting visitors while ensuring that visitor spending benefits local establishments. Glass believes localized gift card programs could help connect those goals.
According to Glass, a destination could create a branded digital experience through which visitors discover restaurants, retailers, attractions, entertainment venues, spas, and service providers in a specific city or region. The gift cards could be incorporated into visitor promotions, convention packages, sweepstakes, resident referral programs, seasonal campaigns, media familiarization trips, or packages designed to encourage visitors to explore more of a destination.
“A tourism organization is not simply giving someone a reward,” Glass says. “It can help introduce that person to the businesses that make the destination distinctive.” Rather than restricting recipients to one predetermined merchant, Glass says the platform can provide choices based on location, category, interests, and available reviews. A destination could promote a local restaurant reward for a dining campaign, an entertainment reward tied to attractions, or a broader selection of community businesses.
Glass says the “support local” story has resonated strongly with prospective partners. She emphasizes that local establishments do not pay for the customers the platform directs to them. “We are sending business to local establishments without charging those businesses for generating the traffic,” Glass says. “That creates a strong alignment with the objectives of chambers, tourism organizations, and communities trying to encourage people to shop and dine locally.”
A More Flexible Approach to Event Dine-arounds
Meeting, incentive travel, and motivational event planners have traditionally managed dine-arounds by reserving groups at a limited number of restaurants, issuing vouchers, reimbursing participants, or providing a general-purpose prepaid card. Glass believes localized digital gift cards can provide planners with another option. According to Glass, participants could receive a dining credit before or during an event and choose a local restaurant that matches their personal preferences. Rather than requiring everyone to attend the same group dinner, attendees could organize their own dine-around experiences in smaller groups.Participants could potentially select restaurants based on cuisine, location, reviews, dietary preferences, or individual interests. Glass says the cards could be delivered by text at a scheduled time, eliminating the need to distribute physical cards or paper vouchers. A planner could send a gift card shortly before an open evening, include it in an arrival communication, or provide it as a thank-you gift following the program.
“The planner can provide the value and structure of a hosted dine-around while giving participants more freedom to decide where and how they want to use it,” Glass says. She believes the concept can extend well beyond dining. Event participants could receive cards for local attractions, spas, entertainment venues, transportation-related services, or other destination experiences. Sponsors could fund a destination-discovery program, while host cities could use the platform to help disperse attendee spending among more local businesses rather than concentrating it within a single hotel or restaurant district.
John Cullen, Senior Vice President of SVS, previously described scalable access to local gift cards as the “Holy Grail of local rewards” because it avoids the historically impractical task of enrolling every neighborhood merchant individually.
Turning Local Choice Into a Scalable Reward
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Glass emphasizes that Gift Card Market is not intended to replace national brands, which will continue to play an important role in reward, recognition, incentive, and loyalty programs.Instead, she says the platform adds a category that has largely been missing: the ability to provide highly local and personally relevant choices with the scale, digital delivery, and ease of use expected from a national gift card platform.
For IRR and loyalty companies, Glass believes that can mean a differentiated catalog, expanded categories, and potentially attractive economics. For tourism organizations, it can provide a new way to direct spending into local communities. For meeting and event planners, it can transform a traditional dine-around or attendee gift into a more flexible and personalized destination experience.
“The common thread is that people often have a stronger emotional relationship with the places they visit every week than they do with another generic gift card,” Glass says. “Our goal is to make those local relationships easy to recognize and reward.”
Enterprise Engagement Alliance Services
Celebrating our 17th year, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance helps organizations enhance performance through:1. Information and marketing opportunities on stakeholder management and total rewards:
- ESM Weekly on stakeholder management since 2009. Click here to subscribe; click here for media kit.
- RRN Weekly on total rewards since 1996. Click here to subscribe; click here for media kit.
- EEA YouTube channel on enterprise engagement, human capital, and total rewards since 2020
Management Academy to enhance future equity value for your organization.3. Books on implementation: Enterprise Engagement for CEOs and Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap.
4. Advisory services and research: Strategic guidance, learning and certification on stakeholder management, measurement, metrics, and corporate sustainability reporting.
5. Permission-based targeted business development to identify and build relationships with the people most likely to buy.
Contact: Bruce Bolger at TheICEE.org; 914-591-7600, ext. 230.
