1 Oct 2025 Changes to CBA Award Partners

[NVRENUF]

No Qantas is not a flexible transfer partner. Qantas direct will remain, there is no change to any direct Qantas earning cards.

oh that's great, thank you for the reply. As this card is good for no international fees and fantastic when over seas. So i really didn't want to change it.

Thank you

 

[ChrisFlyer]

I've recently dumped my Amex and gone for the HSBC Star Alliance Visa. I prefer flying with SQ so it's a no-brainer for me. No point bonus on sign up but instant Gold status once you spend the qualifying amount. The trick is trying to maintain it, not that it's a huge problem, as I normally fly business using either upgrades or reward flights, so score lounge access anyway.

Points available to transfer to any Star Alliance partner via the SA website.

A shame about the earning rate though - it doesn't take much to go past the monthly points threshold. For clarify, points transfers are only available to a select group of Star programs, not to every program of every Star Alliance carrier. It's good if you spend <$3k/mo, but rather unrewarding on spends above that. Different if you need the status from it though.

 

[Palyadoc]

Well, the poor darlings only made $10bn last year in profit. Bound to be some cuts as a result…..

 

[henrus]

Can transfers of any remaining balances be done up to Sep 30?

Yes.

 

[Flyerwin]

CommBank Awards Eliminating Most Transfer Partners

CommBank will remove the ability to transfer Awards Points to all of its frequent flyer program partners, except Virgin Australia Velocity, from 1 October 2025.

www.australianfrequentflyer.com.au

 

[Cddc]

Despite the T&Cs this is inconsistent with consumer law in my opinion. I applied and was approved for a commbank awards card in the past week on the premise of multiple transfer partners. They are not removing one or two partners but effectively turning award cards into virgin velocity only earning cards (along with retail partners). It’s effectively a different card to what has been marketed. If we want a virgin velocity points earning card, there are many more competitive offers in the market. I and am severely disappointed and would never have applied for A Commbank awards card if I had been informed of these changes prior. As this is a significant change I am wondering if is only temporary. I read they had a contract with a Singapore company that handled its award contracts with the airlines and my suspicion is they have terminated that angreement and bringing it in-house?

 

[ramamba]

Or should I just accept the changes, keep my points and wait for the inevitable transfer bonus to Velocity?

it's been a while actually, don't think there were any Velocity offers at all this year.

 

[MG1]

Can do it on the app or online.

If on Netbank you’ll see view awards below award eligible cards. If on the app go to cards and find the eligible card then below it will have view awards.

Once in the awards portal go to redeem, then scroll to travel and finally at the bottom is the Global Frequent traveller programs:

View attachment 464074

I don't recall being notified of this change. If not for AFF, I wouldn't have known. One of the reasons I got this card was to keep some of my balances alive. I'll now have to transfer some points over to AC before time runs out. I've not done this before, let's hope that it's fairly straightforward.
I'll still hang on to it for now as it's good to use as my overseas card but am bitterly disappointed that it's basically becoming a VA-only card (as far as airline FF programs are considered).

 

[esky]

Can do it on the app or online.

If on Netbank you’ll see view awards below award eligible cards. If on the app go to cards and find the eligible card then below it will have view awards.

Once in the awards portal go to redeem, then scroll to travel and finally at the bottom is the Global Frequent traveller programs:

View attachment 464074

I always take half an hour to find it. I swear they keep changing it.

 

[Q Class Plebeian]

No Qantas is not a flexible transfer partner. Qantas direct will remain, there is no change to any direct Qantas earning cards.

Yes there is an error on the AFF article: from the COMBank webpage -Transfer your Awards points via the Awards site to over 10 airline partners, including Qantas Frequent Flyer and Velocity Frequent Flyer (please note from 1 October 2025 members will only be able to transfer to Qantas Frequent Flyer and Velocity Frequent Flyer

 

[MattA]

Haven't seen this mentioned yet, but just spotted this change called out in the fine print on my latest statement (Smart Awards):

Page 7 - "1.2 How many Points you can earn" - in relation to the table that applies to Smart Awards we have changed all references of $5,000 to $4,000

So that's the threshold where the earn rate drops off down to just $4k per statement.

To be honest, probably still keeping this one for now (or at least Mrs MattA will keep hers once we take another run at the signup bonus points). There are so few points earning cards with no fx fees in the market -- I'm certainly not paying 3+% if I don't have to -- and I 'd rather earn some points than none on our intl spend.

At least this one's effectively free, assuming you meet the $2k/month spend.

 

[MG1]

I used the points transfer feature for the first time recently (to keep my AC account alive past November). The CBA website said that it'll take up to a week but I checked my AC account a couple of days later and it was already there.

What a shame that this is going. It was straightforward and only required the minimum integer (differs per program according to the conversion rate - where it's a half, like 2.5, it'll be a minimum of 5 CBA points), unlike some programs where the minimum is in the 1000s.

The FF game is changing, and I've only been in it a shortish amount of time.