Bad news, points junkies: from July this year, you’ll no longer be able to earn Qantas Frequent Flyer points from Optus.
Optus has announced that it will stop taking part in Qantas’ points scheme from June 30, 2015. “It’s part of a new direction we’re taking Optus Yes Rewards,” the announcement site explains. “We’re constantly looking for new ways to reward customers and from time to time this means changing our reward program offering.”
Any qualifying expenditure on Optus products will continue to earn points up until that date. If your bill falls due in early July, you might consider paying in advance to scrape in those last few points.
Optus has offered points for expenditure since 2011. With two points per dollar spent, it was relatively speaking one of the more generous frequent flyer options around. That said, you’d have to buy an awful lot of services to qualify for even one free flight a year.
Comments
One response to “Optus Is Pulling Out Of Qantas Frequent Flyer”
So, if I spend $5000 at Optus, I get a $10 gift card. Wow.
It’s 2 points per dollar, not 2 dollars per point. $5000 spend would get you 10,000 QFF points, which is enough for nearly $75 worth of gift cards.
I’m sad to see this go (I recently added a new mobile plan which would have earned me nearly 4000 points over the next few years), but I’ve gotten over 7000 points from them since they started doing it, for a service I already use. Not much, but better than nothing.
hopefully they move over to Velocity 🙂
feroshious I think you need a quick maths refresher $5,000 spend = 10,000 points. Now depending on which gift card you get, roughly 7,500 points will get you a $50 gift card at any number of redemption partners at the Qantas Shop. So the actual value of 10,000 points in that example is $66.66
This is why loyalty programs should never factor into your thinking when buying something or signing up to something. It’s a nice to have, but it’s also pretty fickle and not very good value.
Optus’ parent company is SINGTEL in Singapore. The EK partnership has alienated QF from a lot of people. They have burnt many bridges. One interesting example is traffic through SIN. SQ has 118 flights a week to Singapore from Australia plus Scoot. Qantas has 28. Sad stuff yet real. I wonder if this is the real reason!