Qantas Group CEO Alan Joyce and Qantas Loyalty CEO Olivia Wirth have announced sweeping changes to the Qantas Frequent Flyer programme that will provide its current 10+ million members with a mixture of good and bad news, but definitely skewed towards the good. These changes are to be rolled out over the next 12 months.
Point Hacks will provide a comprehensive review of all the changes, along with our take over the coming weeks, so stay tuned! But for now, a summary of the changes are listed below.
Details of the changes
The good
- Adding more than 1 million extra reward seats available annually on Qantas as well as on new partner airlines, which include Bangkok Airways, China Airlines, Air France and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
- The new ability to redeem your Qantas Points on domestic Air New Zealand flights—which is available as of now. This opens up almost the entire domestic network, given members can already redeem with Jetstar.

Expect to see more Business Class availability like this
- Slashing carrier charges by as much as 50% on international bookings (excluding direct flights to and from Australia and New Zealand, and select South Pacific destinations). This is estimated to save members around $200 per return flight. All travel classes will see a reduction
- A reduction in the number of points required on domestic and international Economy Classic Rewards
- Creating a new tiered Points Club programme to better reward members who are more frequent buyers than frequent flyers and earn most of their points from on-the-ground transactions. This will be launched in late 2019
The bad
- An up to 15% increase on points for premium cabins on domestic and international Classic Flight Reward seats and up to 9% increase on the points for upgrades. This includes partner airline and oneworld Classic Flight Reward seats
- Round-the-world award pricing will also increase for premium cabins at the rate of 19% for Premium Economy, 14% for Business (the most common redemption) and 8% in First; more specifically, Business will increase from 280,000 to 318,000 points; Economy Class round-the-world awards have dropped immediately in price by 6% to 132,400 points (from 140,000)
The indifferent
Introduction of a Lifetime Platinum status, which will require 75,000 Status Credits to achieve, which will be launched in September 2019. While this is a good change for the very few members who will achieve this, this goal is well out of reach for most members
What’s not changing
Qantas wanted to reiterate that some of the more popular aspects of the programme will not be changing, such as:
- The status tiers of Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Platinum One will remain as is
- The number of Status Credits required to achieve these levels will stay the same
- The number of points and Status Credits earned with Qantas and its partner airlines will also stay the same
Reaction from American Express
Emily Roberts, Vice President of Consumer Acquisition, Loyalty, and Partnerships for American Express Australia and New Zealand, a longstanding partner of Qantas, commented:
As one of American Express’ long standing strategic partners, Qantas has time and time again demonstrated its commitment to providing value to our mutual customers. We believe the changes to the Qantas Frequent Flyer programme will be welcomed by our Qantas American Express card and Platinum card members who will benefit from the increase in Qantas reward seat availability and enjoy greater benefits and savings on their next holiday or business trip.
Summing up
It is great to see Qantas making a genuine effort to address the major concerns of its membership base, especially the long-held bugbear of many members, being availability of reward seats.
We would expect these changes to get a positive reception. Even the negative announcement of an increased points requirement for upgrades and Classic Reward seats comes tied with a promise of increased availability. Hopefully we will start seeing some opening up of award seats soon.
This cool I’m very happy that there will be more Domestic New Zealand options than Jetstar because I personally don’t like the budget airline business model (although Air New Zealand also uses that model quite often so I’d prefer it if there were more Qantas Domestic flights) one change to there FF program I want is for more New Zealand banks to offer Qantas/Oneworld points options on credit card plans.
Do you know if anyone else is having trouble like me with accessing the Qantas Cash debit card part of the FF account? I’ve probably spent more than 5 hours on it and still can’t get in. All I want to do is top up the amount of NZ dollars.
I’ve been a member of the FF programme sine 2011, and used the cash card since 2015. Until now I’ve been very happy with it and never had a problem accessing it. That all changed at the beginning of the year when they introduced the changes. Now it has become a nightmare.
When I call the Qantas “Help” Centre I usually have to wait 30 minutes for someone to answer. Two of the three times I’ve called them I’ve been cut off part way through the call. I don’t think staff are doing it deliberately, I think the system is broke. The one occasion I wasn’t cut off the guy tried to access the cash card account and had the same trouble as me.
The NZ debit cash card is called Qantas Cash, the Australian one is called Qantas Money. I think from my experience that Qantas didn’t factor in the NZ part of the FF programme. When I got into my FF account there is nothing about Qantas Cash. There is a link to Qantas Money, but not Cash.
In addition and worse, Qantas doesn’t help requiring people to have a mobile phone. I don’t have one. None of my other accounts have this requirement. Nor does it make it more secure. For the life of my can’t understand why they send a security code to the phone every time people log into their account.
Poorly thought out and poorly executed. And they pay their CEO over AUS24m per year!
They should change the name to Qantas Micky Mouse Frequent Flyer Programme.
Hi Nigel, I have raised your issue with Qantas who are now looking into it. You can also contact them via the form on this website, so someone from the Qantas team can pick up with you directly to assist: https://www.qantas.com/au/en/support/contact-us/frequent-flyer-membership/contact-form.html.