Qantas Frequent Flyer

With Victoria now joining New South Wales in saying said that it plans to open up to vaccinated visitors from 1 November with no quarantine requirements, and with the Australian government under increasing pressure to open up its borders to international travelers, Qantas is pushing forward with getting its global route network restored and it has now confirmed the international routes that it will start/restart in the coming months.

We've already seen evidence of Qantas chomping at the bit to get flyers traveling internationally again when it brought forward the resumption of two key routes last week, and now the airline has shown more evidence of wanting to get people back in the air by announcing that it has released more award seats than ever before for travel in 2022.

Ok, this is a very niche deal. With Australia essentially shut to incoming and outgoing travel, there probably won't be very many readers looking to convert their flexible currencies into Qantas points but, just in case this is of help to someone (and because Qantas is promoting the fact that you can now earn elite status points from points transfers), I thought I'd write about this promotion nonetheless.

American Express added Qantas Frequent Flyer as a transfer partner for the Membership Rewards program back in June last year and we’ve seen it offer a few transfer bonuses in the intervening months…and now we have another one.

We've used to seeing Amex Membership Rewards offering frequent transfer bonuses to some of the loyalty programs it partners with but transfer bonuses offered by Citi's ThankYou program don't appear all that often...so it's always nice when one turns up.

Qantas is sending out emails to members of its frequent flyer program offering double points on all eligible Qantas flights taken by 31 January 2020. On the face of things that sound pretty good...but there's a catch.

Between Monday 16 September 12:01 AM Eastern and 31 October at 11:59 PM Eastern, Capital One Venture, and Spark Miles account holders will receive a 33.3% bonus on all miles transferred to the Qantas Frequent Flyer program.

Qantas is currently running a promotion in which it’s promoting its “Qantas Red” email newsletter by offering a discount off a Qantas international Economy/Premium Economy fare (departing the US) or a one-time pass to a Qantas Business Class lounge in Australia.

On Tuesday we were given a heads up that Qantas was going to be using a Thursday morning press conference to announce sweeping changes to its Frequent Flyer program, so the past 48 hours can't have been much fun for a lot of travelers down under. When airlines change their frequent flyer programs it's rarely good news for flyers so, understandably, quite a few people were expecting the news to be pretty bad (me included).

Let's face it, it's rarely good news when an airline or hotel chain tells us that it's planning to make some changes to its loyalty program so the fact that Australian Business Traveller is reporting that Qantas will announce "sweeping changes" to its frequent flyer program on Thursday is cause for concern.