Qantas increases points required for Emirates rewards

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This is bad news for me since i (try to) get reward flights once a year going home to germany flying business or first. Although i gotta say it has become infenitly more difficult to get reward seats to europe after qantas introduced the PER-LHR direct flights to begin with. For me anyway.
 
So from the airline perspective,

oh the carrier charges are that much cheaper but we couldnt possibly “reduce the price for you the consumer”, points must go up to balance off but overall it’s the “nothing to see here”. We’ve applied the fair work commissions BOOT test... it’s a swift

From the customer perspective

So you need me to increase my spending by another “name a high price” with a points partner to earn the extra 20,000 points for a return tic - that’s a lot of extra $$ I’m gonna spend just to earn the higher points .... it’s a swift kick of the BOOT 👢

Sighs
that dozen bottles of wine looks more and more inviting
 
Wow, it even has the same image as our article (Qantas Increases Cost of Emirates Reward Flights) which was published 2.5 hours earlier! I don't think it's a coincidence.

@DavidFlynn, care to acknowledge your source this time?
Ausbt not crediting sources? No, surely not, and especially not pulled from AFF. They’ve never done that before, and God forbid if you write something slightly displeasing in their comments section their hierarchy bans you.

@Mattg, thanks again for all of your articles and efforts to AFF.
 
Wow, it even has the same image as our article (Qantas Increases Cost of Emirates Reward Flights) which was published 2.5 hours earlier! I don't think it's a coincidence.

@DavidFlynn, care to acknowledge your source this time?

That's appalling.

Ausbt not crediting sources? No, surely not, and especially not pulled from AFF. They’ve never done that before, and God forbid if you write something slightly displeasing in their comments section their hierarchy bans you.

@Mattg, thanks again for all of your articles and efforts to AFF.

Agreed.
 
Wow, it even has the same image as our article (Qantas Increases Cost of Emirates Reward Flights) which was published 2.5 hours earlier! I don't think it's a coincidence.

@DavidFlynn, care to acknowledge your source this time?

Hi Matt, and thanks for offering me the chance to share my side of this. You may not like my answer to this, but here goes.

First up: the Executive Traveller article was published around 6.30pm yesterday (see ), so I don't know about it being published "2.5 hours" after the AFF article because I didn't even see the AFF home page article on this until you linked to it. See later for an explanation on how we select images and why yes, this was a coincidence.

Source: Executive Traveller's 'source' was a reader who emailed us about this change and pointed to the partner table on the Qantas website. The reader did not mention or link to AFF, and we did not learn about this via AFF.

So, that's your first concern addressed.

Now the reader may well have learned of this from this thread, but he may also have picked it up elsewhere - some other source, word of mouth, who knows – he may even have been looking to make his own EK booking using QF points. The point is, a reader tipped us off to the change and pointed us to the QF partner table, and we took it from there and did our own legwork to pull the article together. Again: a reader emails me, points to the QF website. There's Zero AFF in that.

I did ask Brandon (to whom I assigned the aricle) to quickly see if it had been picked up / covered anywhere else, as this is 'standard procedure' for some of the more niche 'news' articles, so I'd imagine he clicked through to this thread at some stage in that quick coverage check, and I think I did likewise (was a super-busy day yesterday, as they all are of late, so recollection is not 100%)... but that doesn't make AFF a 'source' in any way, it's just a quick check on a story's newsiness which sometimes also determines its priority in the queue. As you'll see from Brandon's article, he did all his own legwork on this plus a statement (arrived this morning) from QF PR.

As to the image: really? Credit me with better judgement than to use the same image even if AFF was the source! But as it happens, the image we used is a standard EK PR-supplied image, it's one which sits in our library and one we have used many times before, and we chose it for the same reasons you probably did. So yeah, total concidence.

Here's some background: we have a number of standard 'go-to' EK PR images which we try to rotate through. How do we choose which image to run? For starters and for a flight- or cabin-centric story , I generally aim to get a shot that's business class (unless the story leans very much towards F) and which includes a person (many aviation sites just run pics of planes, which for me is almost a last resort). We have some pics of passengers in EK J seats but the images are not immediately recogniseable as EJ to the mainstream reader, and that's a goodly chunk of the audience, hence why the presence of cabin crew works in this instance. And I could have used a shot of just EK cabin crew, or crew in front of a plane, but this is about booking a seat, and so the seat is for me a key part of choosing a suitable image. Join those dots and you can see why we chose the pic we did – and again, I imagine you chose it for much the same reason.

That might be more info that you desired but it's a window into the process by which I and many other editors and writers select photos – it's a selection process which takes but seconds in real time, and it's the process through which this pic was chosen. Hell, as mentioned earlier, I didn't even know AFF had used this image on any home page story until you mentioned it.

Thanks for the chance to explain this, and while I suspect some may choose not accept that explanation, that's not on me.
 
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Hi Matt.

You may not like the answer to this, but here goes.

First up, Executive Traveller's 'source' was a reader who emailed us about this change and pointed to the partner table on the Qantas website. The reader did not mention or link to AFF, and we did not learn about this via AFF.

So, that's your first concern addressed.

Now the reader may well have learned of this from this thread, but he may also have picked it up elsewhere - some other source, word of mouth, who knows – he may even have been looking to make his own EK booking using QF points. The point is, a reader tipped us off to the change, pointed us to the QF partner table and we took it from there. Again: a reader emails me, points to the QF website. Zero AFF there.

I did ask Brandon (to whom I assigned the aricle) to quickly see if it had been picked up / covered anywhere else, as this is 'standard procedure' for some of the more niche 'news' articles, so I'd imagine he clicked through to this thread at some stage in that quick coverage check, and I think I did likewise (was a super-busy day yesterday, as they all are of late, so recollection is not 100%)... but that doesn't make AFF a 'source' in any way, it's just a quick check on a story's newsiness which sometimes also determines its priority in the queue. As you'll see from Brandon's article, he did all his own legwork on this plus a statement (arrived this morning) from QF PR.

As to the image: really? The image we used is a standard EK PR-supplied image, it's one which sits in our library and one we have used many times before, and we chose it for the same reasons you probably did. So yeah, total concidence.

Here's some background: we have a number of standard 'go-to' EK PR images which we try to rotate through, and I always aim to get a shot that's business class (unless the story leans very much towards F) and which includes a person (many aviation sites just run pics of planes, which for me is almost a last resort). We have some pics of passengers in EK J seats but they're not immediately recogniseable as EJ to the mainstream, hence why the cabin crew works in this instance. And I could have used a shot of just EK cabin crew or crew in front of a plane, but this is about booking a seat, and so the seat is for me a key part of choosing a suitable image.

That might be more info that you desired but it's a window into the process by which I and many other editors and writers select photos – it's a selection process which takes but seconds in real time, and it's the process through which this pic was chosen. Hell, I didn't even know AFF had used this image on any home page story until you mentioned it.

So yeah, the pic was an absolute coincidence, and you can credit me with more sense than to use the same image even if AFF was the source.

Thanks for the chance to explain this, and while I suspect some may choose not accept that explanation, that's not on me.

David,

Thank you for taking the time to respond. I am willing to accept that this could have been a coincidence in this instance and I accept your explanation about the choice of image. Regarding the timing, I can confirm that we published our article at 3.59pm yesterday and made a Facebook post about it at 5.18pm (see )

However, Executive Traveller (and formerly AusBT) has a long history of copying or basing stories on content from AFF, without crediting the source or giving at least a "tip of the hat", as is standard industry practice (and common decency). I cannot remember any time where Executive Traveller has credited AFF for a story (happy to be proven wrong here) and I'm sure your readers have noticed that your website barely ever credits sources for its stories, unless it comes from somewhere like the Australian Financial Review.

I can give you plenty of other examples of Executive Traveller articles that have been based on AFF content, yet have not acknowledged this.

For example, last year Qantas provided information about changes to Priority Boarding to AFF exclusively, after more than a week of back-and-forth discussions. Around an hour after we published our article, Executive Traveller published a very similar article about the changes without crediting AFF as the source. This story went on to get picked up by other media outlets which all credited Executive Traveller for breaking the story.

This is not a new thing, either. In 2018, we published an article explaining the ongoing United status match challenge. The following day, AusBT released its own very similar article all about this "new" challenge. The thing is, it wasn't a new challenge at all - it had been around for years, but our article must have alerted you to this. About a month later, we published another article about the Delta status match challenge. Same thing - the following day, ET/AusBT published an article that very closely mirrored ours. Nobody else was talking about the Delta challenge at the time, and it wasn't a new challenge either. The source could not have been anyone other than AFF.

Then there were articles last year about the possibility of Oneworld alliance-wide upgrades (we published an original article on 2 December, and ET picked it up on 4 December) and new Qantas lifetime benefits (the ET article came shortly after ours) to name a few more examples. Sure, some of these could have been a coincidence. But not all of them.

Copying AFF content without acknowledging the source is not only poor ettiquette, but it hurts AFF commercially too. I think it's time we called it out.
 
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Another example more recently, the QR status match that I posted mid morning May 18th - Qatar Airways status match to Virgin Australia

2 hours later “Copy & Paste Traveller” posted the same link and story without any Sources or Tip of the Hat. I even called them out on this in post #132 of that thread. The status match had been open for almost a week so don’t please don’t claim that you coincidentally received it directly from the Qatar PR team or by word of mouth etc. Some common courtesy is not only polite but also professional.
 
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How come there have been at least 20 contributions re this QF FF change but not one has mentioned the word 'enhancement?'

Is this previously popular (and apt) description another victim of the changed environment forced by COVID-19?
 
Maybe the key when AFF breaks a story is to then forward that to media sources for their publication, and get the credit?
 
Maybe the key when AFF breaks a story is to then forward that to media sources for their publication, and get the credit?

Yes, have a specific header and write it as a media release. Target travel journalists at News Ltd (including 'Escape' travel section' plus 9 Group (latter 'SMH'/'The Age.'

'T & L' in 'The Australian' is another outlet to which releases could be sent.

'E Travel Blackboard', 'Travel Weekly' and others are also good ones to contact.

Publish it on AFF concurrently with sending it to those orgs, or to try out the new strategy just send it to those travel writers and see if any publish and (importantly) attribute the source. Then publish it on AFF once a few days have elapsed.

Deliberately avoid 'Executive Traveller' given what AFF's Mattg suggests is its record.

One golden rule, probably ignored by many in PR companies, is to only send an item to media if one judges that they will find it of interest to their audience. Demographics of publications differ widely, with some catering to the diminishing number of travel agents and others to Joe Public, and latter vary by income, spending and frequency of travel.
 
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Ausbt not crediting sources? No, surely not, and especially not pulled from AFF. They’ve never done that before, and God forbid if you write something slightly displeasing in their comments section their hierarchy bans you.

@Mattg, thanks again for all of your articles and efforts to AFF.

Not to forget the copy editing on AFF is usually leagues ahead of AusBT/ET... unless they are syndicating articles directly from Bloomberg (which they at least acknowledge)
 
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