The Play
Wyndham Hotels & Resorts (NYSE: WH) is converting Route 66's centennial into a foodservice-adjacent loyalty marketing moment, launching "Flavors of the Open Road"—a limited-edition candy collection that bundles destination-inspired confections with a meaningful points reward. Just 100 boxes go on sale August 20 at 10 a.m. ET through WyndhamRewards.com/Route66, priced at $19.26 plus tax (shipping included), a deliberate nod to 1926, the year the Mother Road was designated.
The Package
Each premium keepsake box contains six 2.5-ounce jars of regionally inspired candy, a curated guide to the restaurants, roadside attractions, and local operators behind each flavor, and 30,000 Wyndham Rewards points—enough for up to two nights at brands including Days Inn, Super 8, Ramada, and La Quinta. The six flavors map directly to food-forward stops along the corridor: deep-dish pizza (Chicago), pecan pie (Tulsa), smoked brisket (Amarillo), roasted green chile (Albuquerque), prickly pear soft serve (Flagstaff), and root beer float (Kingman, Ariz.). Each SKU is paired with a named local operator—Lou Malnati's and Giordano's in Chicago, Tyler's Barbeque in Amarillo, Monroe's and Frontier in Albuquerque—giving independent foodservice operators rare co-branded visibility within a national hotel loyalty campaign.
Why It Matters for Operators
The promotion illustrates a broader trend in hospitality loyalty: brands engineering experiential LTOs that blur the line between lodging reward and food-and-beverage discovery. With more than 400 Wyndham-flagged properties positioned near Route 66 and 126 million enrolled Wyndham Rewards members worldwide, the campaign functions as a targeted daypart and destination marketing vehicle for the independent restaurants named in each box's guide. For regional foodservice operators along the corridor, that kind of embedded referral inside a national loyalty program—reaching travelers already in trip-planning mode—is difficult to replicate through conventional co-op advertising. Michael Shiwdin, GVP of Integrated Marketing, Loyalty & Digital at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, framed the collection around the experiential value of road-trip dining: the barbecue joint you still talk about, the diner with the best pie. That positioning aligns with research consistently showing food as a primary driver of leisure travel itinerary decisions.
The drop is structured as a strict scarcity play—one box per household, U.S. residents only, first-come first-served. At $19.26 per unit and 100 units total, gross revenue tops out at $1,926 before tax, making this functionally a brand-building exercise rather than a revenue event. The real unit economics sit in the loyalty currency: 30,000 points per box represents meaningful redemption inventory, and driving members toward Route 66 properties during summer travel season directly supports occupancy and ancillary foodservice spend at on-property outlets.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
