Every screen the user
touches, in one voice.
From homepage to checkout, the copy had to explain a completely new mental model without slowing anyone down.
India's first airport privilege programme. Free meals, shopping, and spa across 300+ airport stores — built and written from scratch, for a behaviour that didn't exist yet.
Most cards targeting Scapia's user base already offered lounge access — it stopped being a reason to choose or love the card.
Overcrowded lounges, long wait times, complimentary access usually for the cardholder alone — not the people they travel with.
Smaller airports often had limited or no lounge facilities at all, making the "benefit" unusable for a large chunk of trips.
Eligible users could eat, shop, or spa at any of 300+ outlets across the airport — free. Simply tap the Scapia card to pay, and get the entire value back as Scapia coins.
Meal, shopping, or spa — at any participating outlet in the airport.
Use the Scapia co-branded card at checkout. No separate claim, no voucher.
100% of the value returns as Scapia coins — up to ₹1,000 at metro airports, ₹500 at the rest.
Premium domestic lounges in India cost the business ₹900–₹1,500 per visit, long-term, at scale. Paying users back in Scapia coins — instead of absorbing a flat lounge cost — introduced breakage into the journey, and pushed users to complete the redemption loop by booking travel on the Scapia app.
The hardest part wasn't the offer — it was making a first-time user understand something that had never existed before, in one line. Most users only knew "lounge." So the line had to borrow that familiarity, then stretch it: this isn't a room, it's the whole terminal.
The other angles compounded awareness but didn't move behaviour on their own — a sign the real blocker sat downstream of messaging. More on that ahead.
From homepage to checkout, the copy had to explain a completely new mental model without slowing anyone down.
A single swipe activates the offer. The copy on the activation screen had one job: make a stranger trust a claim that sounds too good — free food, no catch — in under two seconds.
Users could browse meal and shopping options for any airport they were travelling to, days before the trip — so the decision was already made by the time they landed. Claiming itself stayed gated to real airport presence.
Since the feature was completely foreign to regular credit card users, first-time entry needed a walkthrough that set expectations in seconds — not a paragraph of onboarding copy nobody would read.
People who tried it once became loyal to it — the product itself was solid. The problem was the first try. Most users defaulted to lounge access out of pure habit, because that's the only mental model they had for a travel card benefit.
Most users kept reaching for lounge access instead of trying something with no prior category.
Launch drove a spike in support calls — users needed the benefit explained before they'd trust it.
Users who claimed it once came back — and started maximising every card benefit, not just this one.
So we stopped iterating on hooks and started iterating on friction — every "newer problem" the PM brought was, at its root, a words problem: what the user saw, when, and how much of it.
I was the founding writer on Airport Privileges — working daily alongside PMs, the growth manager, designers, and the supply team, from the first product screens to the day it launched publicly.
Because nothing like this had been built by any Indian brand before, there was no existing playbook — every friction point the PM raised had to be solved fresh, in words, screen by screen.
The budget followed the evidence — organic, in-app, and CRM first while this was still an unproven experiment; influencers and performance ads only once the product itself had earned the right to be marketed harder.
The other half was making a feature nobody had ever seen before feel worth trying. That's where the marketing side of the work picked up.
A behind-the-scenes look at building India's first airport privilege programme — written and produced alongside the product work, not after it.
Airport Privileges shipped as India's first programme of its kind in 2024 — built, written, and marketed by the same hand, one friction point at a time.
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