Qantas Frequent Flyer changes coming in early 2024

[mviy]

The things I want the most are:
A return to pre-COVID prices or close to.
A380 for MEL-LHR
More J/F classic reward seats on QF and partner airlines to/from LHR

 

[jase05]

Another bold prediction: QFF moves to Avios currency the same way Qatar and FinnAir did. Soon all OneWorld airlines will use Avios as the currency for travel alliance wide

No way will QR let them in on it and I sincerely hope the Avios cartel further distance themselves from QF

 

[djtech]

No way will QR let them in on it and I sincerely hope the Avios cartel further distance themselves from QF

Never say never... Akbar is gone, and if Qatar decision gets reviewed.....!!!

 

[Seat0B]

hard to get PC Plus unless you're either flying an awful lot

You can only count 20,000 points from flying, so not really a lot given you heed 350,000 for PC+. PC and PC+ are meant for people earning a lot of points on the ground and who therefore don’t have higher tiered frequent Flyer status.

 

[Pat2065]

Qantas CEO Vanessa Hudson flagged "permanent improvements" to the Qantas Frequent Flyer program, to be announced early next year, at today's AGM.

Details here:

https://www.australianfrequentflyer.com.au/qantas-changes-coming-early-2024/

What Frequent Flyer changes would you like Qantas to announce in early 2024?

1. When purchasing a flight with cash for another person, there should be an option for the buyer to keep the points or to give them to the lucky recipient. if they are a QFF.

2. Once Lifetime Gold is achieved, not much incentive to go for LT Platinum (and too big a jump). It would be nice for ongoing Platinum members to get some loyalty benefit. E.g. after a couple of consecutive Platinum years, be given a LTP benefit for life.

3. Self-funded Platinum members should be recognised and rewarded. Many Platinums are there solely due to their work, which is fine, but is not really loyalty. The loyalty largely comes from their company. The rest of us pay out of our own pockets which makes achieving status and the loyalty factor much more personal and considered. Maybe retirees (e.g. Holders of Seniors card or Gold Opal Card) could be the determination for benefits. As well as having the time and inclination to travel, health and comfort drives retirees to J class, often with the next generations in tow.

4. Smoothing of points over 2-3 years rather than an annual status determination would be great, especially again for self-funded FFs. Ditching a lot of SCs just because it's the end of a FF year is always sad.

 

[jase05]

Never say never... Akbar is gone, and if Qatar decision gets reviewed.....!!!

Until QF divorces EK I’d say zero chance

 

[RichardMEL]

A few mentions in the thread of "self funded" status pax.

Before I comment further I will put it out there that I am entirely self funded and have been for 99.8% of my travel life (I've had exactly 2 trips funded by others over the course of hundreds over the decades).

So. having said that, I fully get it. For those that pay out of their own pocket and accrue status etc vs those paid for by the company that it seems perhaps should get more.

My question is - How is QF supposed to identify these folks accurately? Sure, those flying on corporate contracts are easy to identify, and those paying via a business travel account or agent also would be easy to identify. How about those who are in small business and pay via say a QBR linked card? yes, they could be identified. Even potentially those paying via a linked QF earning CC - eg Amex or QF Money then QF could potentially identify a Business level account vs personal.

But what if one pays business expenses via an unlinked card ? would that detail be opaque or not? And if one is a sole trader/consultant that has a "business" but more or less is operating as themselves and thus could be called "self funded" but going through an ABN via QBR or similiar... are they counted as business spend or personal/self funded?

What if business pax pay by means other than a card?


And where is the line? ie: if I own a business and derive income from it, but spend that income personally for travel - even if it is for work related to the business - is that self funded or business travel? how would QF know?


Gov spend is much easier to determine imo and we know QF do, of course, differentiate based on gov funded travel vs regular business or personally funded.

I think this could be so murky, with room for so many exceptions it would be really difficult

and most importantly in terms of a desire to do something like this - what does QF care? a buck is a buck and it's all revenue. They have set up QBR to push business related (in theory) spend their way and give some reward for that, but in terms of personally funded flying it's probably generally lumped into leisure travel and while high value leisure travel would be there (think the folks who can and do pay full J/F) - the actual numbers would probably be fairly low in terms of actual yield. QF has incentive to reward business spend but probably are not so worried about the leisure spend.

Sure, QF wants to reward spend - and that's why there's PC and PCP as well as the rewards for spending more for customers (ie higher SC's for, in general, higher fare types).

I just don't think this is a direction that QF would want to go. In fact, if it sabotaged the rewards of something like QBR, which potentially generates more revenue overall for QF, they have even less incentive to do anything special for the self funded. After all, as far as they're concerned, self funded pax are the ones most likely to either go BFOD or jump ship so thew ROI is likely considered less than offering more to corporates, QBR members and so on.

imo.

 

[levelnine]

Remember Doug Parker has an involvement here. Now sure, he's not running Loyalty, but probably would have some influence on direction... in terms of AAesque changes.

I think this is an interesting point.

Doug Parker oversaw AA's transition to its current Loyalty Point scheme, which was a pioneering move in the airline industry (Delta's latest changes are basically playing catch up to AA's program).

I've speculated in other threads that I thought Qantas might follow this trend, and maybe 2024 will be the year. It makes so much sense from an airline's perspective. Have a single metric to gauge loyalty that is tied to how valuable you are to that airline — how much you earn them through flight spend, credit card spend, hotel spend, etc.

The only thing that makes me doubt it is the recent surveys about making PC/PCP more valuable. Moving to a single loyalty metric based on dollars earned through all partners would entail, essentially, shutting down PC/PCP & merging it with QFF. Why bother trying to improve PC/PCP if you're about to shut it down?

Undertaking such a move certainly would allow Hudson to make her mark on the airline.

 

[djtech]

I think this is an interesting point.

Doug Parker oversaw AA's transition to its current Loyalty Point scheme, which was a pioneering move in the airline industry (Delta's latest changes are basically playing catch up to AA's program).

I've speculated in other threads that I thought Qantas might follow this trend, and maybe 2024 will be the year. It makes so much sense from an airline's perspective. Have a single metric to gauge loyalty that is tied to how valuable you are to that airline — how much you earn them through flight spend, credit card spend, hotel spend, etc.

The only thing that makes me doubt it is the recent surveys about making PC/PCP more valuable. Moving to a single loyalty metric based on dollars earned through all partners would entail, essentially, shutting down PC/PCP & merging it with QFF. Why bother trying to improve PC/PCP if you're about to shut it down?

Undertaking such a move certainly would allow Hudson to make her mark on the airline.

I'm not a fan of many of Parker's changes, but you can't beat their effectiveness. I do wish we had better integration of credit card spending and the program beyond just the $1 point per dollar though. Surely we could get better credit card benefits than just a few lounge passes. I know PC is there to partially compensate, but would be nice if they did something like a 2 for 1 voucher as the UK or something like that.

 

[Jhart2460]

I would like to see family pooling of points like Virgin has.

 

[CaptJCool]

Following on from @RichardMEL comments on self funding

I suppose it’s a bit similar to the question of how often does an employer pay its payroll ? Weekly, fortnightly or monthly or do different parts of the workforce get paid on different cycles ?

Once the principles are laid out,

one could data analyse the groupings, the payment sources and cycles & fare levels paid (RedE deal, Savers, full flexi, J and F) the number of PAX

Work travel obviously done by employer portal
I’ve done self-booking and travel agent bookings for family holidays
Self-bookings for tax expensed international conferences
But overall they could see the split of spend.

I do suspect paying for 5 others meant some comp’d WP years where my personal SCs didn’t make the target ….

As for sole traders, some Level of judgment necessary to think through, if not QBR registered, are they with/without others or family, postcode of home address, any bookings on Qantas hotels - there’s a lot of data that could usefully be joined up to “tag” split spending

 

[RichardMEL]

oh the data is there, and really GOOD data mining knows exactly who we are and what we're spending on what and likely where the money comes from (probably the data profiles QFF has on us internally probably would surprise I suppose). Increasing use of AI in data mining would also have its place too I guess. Figuring out if family travel, or if patterns of travel do not match others (eg if the business spend is mostly to SYD, BNE and say SIN, but a booking is made to say YVR to go skiing, that could be a more nuanced point that may or may not be picked up. After all YVR could just as easily be a conference or new client....) And still, if booking with family - could also be members of the family business and/or employed by the same company (I've been at a few places where nepotism rates were high!)

it's all very nuanced of course. I do wonder if this is a differentiation (in terms of figuring out self funded flyers) that they actually would care about?

 

[djtech]

oh the data is there, and really GOOD data mining knows exactly who we are and what we're spending on what and likely where the money comes from (probably the data profiles QFF has on us internally probably would surprise I suppose). Increasing use of AI in data mining would also have its place too I guess. Figuring out if family travel, or if patterns of travel do not match others (eg if the business spend is mostly to SYD, BNE and say SIN, but a booking is made to say YVR to go skiing, that could be a more nuanced point that may or may not be picked up. After all YVR could just as easily be a conference or new client....) And still, if booking with family - could also be members of the family business and/or employed by the same company (I've been at a few places where nepotism rates were high!)

it's all very nuanced of course. I do wonder if this is a differentiation (in terms of figuring out self funded flyers) that they actually would care about?

Another thing that Qantas could learn from the Americans - they have gotten good at using that data every step of the process from booking to actually flying. They should know by now how much they'd need to pay me to be bumped off an oversold flight in the morning. Why not give me 10,000 points and send me on my merry way instead of a rude shock at the airport?

 

[CaptJCool]

it's all very nuanced of course. I do wonder if this is a differentiation (in terms of figuring out self funded flyers) that they actually would care about?

That’s a FAIR POINT
Noting The info on this post

Using points to retain Platinum ...

Dilution of status and the frequent flyer program in general has been happening for at least the past 12 years. Upgrade credits replaced by loyalty bonus which has since been enhanced 2-3 times. For reference 3 UC's earned after 1,200 SCs were good for a one-way upgrade to business...

www.australianfrequentflyer.com.au

SELECT ALL
where annual spend > $20,000 & status credits > 1,000

Qantas & Teradata

How integrated marketing is helping Qantas personalise engagement with Frequent Flyers

Implementing an all-in-one marketing platform is not only helping Qantas drastically improve campaign turnaround times, it’s also opening the door to personalised and real-time customer engagement and communication.

www.cmo.com.au

They do know the Sydney harbour side suburbs are the BIG SPENDERS
(Gosh they even elected MHR with that surname haha)



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[elanshin]

oh the data is there, and really GOOD data mining knows exactly who we are and what we're spending on what and likely where the money comes from (probably the data profiles QFF has on us internally probably would surprise I suppose). Increasing use of AI in data mining would also have its place too I guess. Figuring out if family travel, or if patterns of travel do not match others (eg if the business spend is mostly to SYD, BNE and say SIN, but a booking is made to say YVR to go skiing, that could be a more nuanced point that may or may not be picked up. After all YVR could just as easily be a conference or new client....) And still, if booking with family - could also be members of the family business and/or employed by the same company (I've been at a few places where nepotism rates were high!)

it's all very nuanced of course. I do wonder if this is a differentiation (in terms of figuring out self funded flyers) that they actually would care about?

OffT but Qantas most certainly knows the spending habit of it's customers - whether they can compile that into meaningful marketing is something they may not still be good at. It takes a fair bit of IT work along with data analysts to implement properly and we all know what Qantas IT is like.

OnT: I don't think there should be any distinguishment between self funded and corporate. Money is money is money. Doesn't necessarily matter how it comes in as long as the carrot on the stick to get it in is there.

The other area we can see QF fix thing's a bit is simplifying SC earning. Partner earnings is a of a headache as to what earns and what doesnt earn. (Maybe partner airlines will earn at the same rate as QF or only minorly decreased for the same route).

Ultimately I do think they need just more point spending options. The general public won't feel as cough about nowhere to spend points if the internal value for points for goods and services that arent QF CR flights isn't terrible. I actually feel that if Qantas wants to be smart about it, they can easily up the redemption rate for QF Points in their marketplace and really start dominating in that space AND make more people happy that their points spent there don't feel like cough.

 

[RichardMEL]

I think the point raised above about how QF uses the data and by that I mean using it effectively is important.

I keep seeing these kinds of comments from QF or analysits about how they ?better target" or "engage with" the FFers. I'm yet to personally see any seemingly obvious evidence of this. Now true, as a P1 for some years now I'm not the key target I would think (they probably consider me "rusted on" and not worth a lot of effort - making a big assumption this particular cash cow will keep pumping revenue their way as opposed to others).

I mean, truly sophisticated CRM systems should target specific areas and look for upsells, and add ons. I see nothing like this from QF that seems anything more than an automated "you booked flight to X, how about a hotel deal there" type email that sometimes shows up post bookings. I don't consider that very sophisticated or very targeted. By the same token, I have to giggle at the notion of getting bid to upgrade offers for flights - given I have a 6 figure cache of points and the priority to upgrade, if I wanted to, I could (and why not send me an email reminding me that I could upgrade for X poins?). Even more hilariously weird, the odd time I've had an email suggesting I buy lounge access (I'm serious - I've had one or two!) - I mean, I'm P1 and LTG - you're either assuming I'm really stupid, or you're not using te data you have on me smartly (OTOH, if I was flying with more than one other person, sending an email to remind me I may have guest invitations available, or to buy access for the 3rd pax, would make absolute sense).

I'd love to actually see real indications of QFF actively and inteliggently "engaging" with us in the kind of way they probably should be able to. Anyone have any examples?

 

[elanshin]

I'd love to actually see real indications of QFF actively and inteliggently "engaging" with us in the kind of way they probably should be able to. Anyone have any examples?

I don't think Qantas has or is capable of this despite the huge potential. I find this is a common theme in big older legacy companies that don't want to spend r&d to improve IT despite the fact that it would likely save them lots of money or generate lots of revenue because it's hard to quantify the financial benefits up against the outlay. I could see AI having huge improvements in the travel industry given how clunky everything is.

 

[serfty]

OnT: I don't think there should be any distinguishment between self funded and corporate. Money is money is money. Doesn't necessarily matter how it comes in as long as the carrot on the stick to get it in is there.

There is a very basic differentiation between self funded and corporate. It is revenue per PAX.

Everything else being equal, the revenue earned from a corporate traveler's fare will be in the order of 20% less than that for the self funded traveller. (There are other costs to the Airline in maintaining a corporate contract, but they are likely insignificant in relation to this discussion.)

 

[exceladdict]

oh the data is there, and really GOOD data mining knows exactly who we are and what we're spending on what and likely where the money comes from (probably the data profiles QFF has on us internally probably would surprise I suppose). Increasing use of AI in data mining would also have its place too I guess. Figuring out if family travel, or if patterns of travel do not match others (eg if the business spend is mostly to SYD, BNE and say SIN, but a booking is made to say YVR to go skiing, that could be a more nuanced point that may or may not be picked up. After all YVR could just as easily be a conference or new client....) And still, if booking with family - could also be members of the family business and/or employed by the same company (I've been at a few places where nepotism rates were high!)

it's all very nuanced of course. I do wonder if this is a differentiation (in terms of figuring out self funded flyers) that they actually would care about?

Absolutely, I don't doubt Qantas could be better at predicting my spending patterns than I am (and probably better at predicting it on the ground than in the air, considering all the places points are being earned and data is being harvested).

But taking the time to build the capability to analyse it requires effort. The big banks are doing some really cool stuff in this space.

There is a very basic differentiation between self funded and corporate. It is revenue per PAX.

Everything else being equal, the revenue earned from a corporate traveler's fare will be in the order of 20% less than that for the self funded traveller. (There are other costs to the Airline in maintaining a corporate contract, but they are likely insignificant in relation to this discussion.)

But only for big corporates right? AFAIK SMEs get marginal benefits from QBR, ultimately paying close to publicly available fares.

FWIW I believe there's a good argument that road warriors, however funded, to be rewarded with status benefits. If it came down to spend based on personal dollars, I feel like self funded would lose out, as they may be more inclined to fly BFOD (emphasis on may, YMMV of course).

 

[AndyC1970]

Business class dreaming: All I want is a decent sized tasty 3 course meal served within an hour of departure. Smiling, not surly, staff optional extra!