OTR App

Established: 1984
OTR’s proud history began as a South Australian family-run BP service station in 1984.

Today, OTR is part of the Viva Energy Group – an ASX-listed organisation with a driving ambition to become Australia’s largest convenience retailer. Together, Viva Energy and OTR operate more than 1,000 locations nationwide, combining OTR’s culture of innovation with Viva Energy’s national footprint and operational strength.

Employees: Over 6,500 staff across 200+ locations
Headquarters: Norwood, Adelaide, South Australia
Websites: www.otr.com.au | OTR App

OTR’s leadership team wanted to replace a manual “buy-four-get-one-free” loyalty card with a digital experience that would be fast, seamless, and scalable. The challenge was to build an intuitive mobile app that replicated the simplicity of the in-store offer while capturing customer data, encouraging repeat visits, and laying the foundations for a broader digital loyalty ecosystem across OTR’s service stations.

They also wanted to future-proof their business, enabling new features like car-wash rewards, gamified fuel discounts, and voice-activated ordering, all without disrupting day-to-day operations.

The Distillery partnered closely with OTR’s executive and technology teams to design and build the company’s first mobile app – a custom loyalty platform that digitised the coffee rewards experience and connected customers directly to their nearest OTR store.

Applying The Distillery’s facilitated innovation model the team adopted a “keep it simple” philosophy, delivering an MVP that replicated the core loyalty mechanic before gradually adding advanced functionality. This iterative, partnership-driven approach allowed the app to evolve into a sophisticated loyalty engine featuring:

• Mobile ordering for coffee and car washes
• Bluetooth beacons for real-time in-store experiences
• Gamified fuel discounts that drove engagement and retention
• Voice-activated ordering pilots using Siri and Google Assistant for safer, hands-free convenience

The Distillery’s role extended beyond development… it included solution architecture, user experience design, integration with OTR’s custom backend systems, and long-term support across multiple enhancement phases spanning more than a decade.

The OTR App rapidly became one of Australia’s most recognised retail loyalty platforms, amassing over 500,000 downloads and transforming how customers engage with the brand.
Key outcomes included:

• A significant increase in customer retention and repeat purchases, driven by mobile convenience and loyalty gamification
• A seamless user experience that helped redefine perceptions of “servo coffee”, positioning OTR as a genuine café competitor
• The creation of a digital ecosystem that extended across multiple OTR-owned brands and categories (coffee, car wash, fuel)

A technology foundation that contributed to OTR’s billion-dollar acquisition by Viva Energy, underscoring the strategic value of its digital assets