A paper punch card has one job (remind a guest to come back) and it fails at that job constantly, because it gets left at home, lost in a bag, or thrown out in a wallet clear-out long before the tenth visit.
What changes with a wallet pass
Loyalty status lives in a phone's existing wallet app (the same place boarding passes and tickets already sit) so it's present without requiring a guest to install anything new or remember a separate login.
Why this connects to visibility
A pass that's always in a guest's wallet is a pass they see repeatedly, not just at the point of a transaction, a structural advantage a physical card sitting in a kitchen drawer simply doesn't have.
Tied directly to guest data, not a standalone points ledger
Because the loyalty pass connects to the same guest profile as POS and reservations, status updates automatically with every visit, no separate manual punch, no risk of a staff member forgetting to scan it.
A punch card's failure mode is being forgotten. A wallet pass's advantage isn't that it's more sophisticated. It's that it's simply present more consistently, which is most of what makes a loyalty program actually work.