Topguest, a San Francisco-based startup company providing loyalty and social network engagement products to travel companies has been acquired by ezRez which is a provider of provider of travel, loyalty and payment solutions and counts many big names as its customers.

Topguest has been quite popular of late due to the fact that it enables members of leading travel loyalty programs, such as United MileagePlus, Continental One Pass, IHG Priority Club and Hilton HHonors, to earn reward points for geo-located check-ins via their mobile devices and its website by linking their accounts with Topguest service.  The utilizes the check-in feature of the social apps such as Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and Twitter to help its subscribers earn miles and hotel points and receive exclusive offers and bonuses for simply using some of these popular social services.  As I had blogged earlier Topguest recently announced a white label product that will enable traditional loyalty programs to implement a fully branded social network component. Based on data derived from their members’ social networking activity, loyalty programs can carefully target and customize offers that are relevant to each member.  The white label product is currently in beta with starting with Hilton as its launch partner.

ezRez plans to integrate Topguest solution into its existing travel booking platform for airlines, hotels and online travel agencies to help people earn points for various activities.  Points can then be redeemed for travel via ezRez’s loyalty travel platform, or for merchandise via ezRez’s new digital wallet product that allows points to pay for merchandise and services across the internet. The digital wallet product was announced in October with inaugural partners PayPal and United MileagePlus, and will launch in 2012. The details about the same can be found here and here.

It seems to be a great combo for the frequent travellers as they get to earn some extra points for almost every activity of their travel schedule and other related aspects of their daily life. Lets see how this partnership shapes up in the coming year and what all new products they have to offer the frequent flyers.

As reported by Techcrunch, social loyalty start-up Topguest which allows you to collect airline, hotel and other travel rewards points for your social networking activity, like Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook check-ins and Instagram photos. has announced plans for launching a new service that will allow loyalty programs to tailor their rewards and communication with its customers based on the social data collected from them.

Topguest has said that their first partner for this new product will be Hilton whose social loyalty program will be powered by Topguest, The interactive social program would be available via www.socialhhonors.com (the site is yet to go live) whereby Hilton Honors members will receive 2,500 points simply for connecting their Facebook account and will have the opportunity to earn even more points for further engaging with the brand in various social promotions and check-ins via different mediums.

This will help Loyalty programs offer customized solutions for the members based on their location activity besides from the regular award of points for check-ins. and also help the programs like Hilton use social media to boost their sales rather just being advertising mediums and complaint boards.

Their has been lot of talk about how Topguest check-ins have been abused by people and there is a very good post by fellow blogger UnRoadWarrior here and here talking about the same and what Topguest perceives as legitimate check-ins, the point here is that people need to understand that every service runs on good faith and specially for an innovative concept like this, fine tuning will happen on the job