It’s our 100th episode of the AFF on Air podcast! To celebrate this milestone, we’re taking a look back at the early days of the Australian Frequent Flyer forum.
AFF has founded in 1998 by Clifford Reichlin, who continued to own and operate the website until 2022. The website started out as a points calculator to help Qantas Frequent Flyer and Ansett Global Rewards members work out how many points they needed to book an award flight. At the time, neither Qantas nor Ansett offered that functionality on their own websites, and the tool proved to be a hit – but soon became obsolete as the airlines caught up.
AFF needed to pivot, so Clifford set up a bulletin board where frequent flyers could share tips and ask travel questions. This morphed into the Australian Frequent Flyer forum that we know and love today.
In this episode of AFF on Air, Matt chats to Clifford about the history of AFF. He’s also joined by the third person to ever join the AFF forum and one of the original forum moderators, Lindsay Wilson. Lindsay is still a forum moderator today and posts as “QF WP”.
You can read more about the history of AFF in this thread from 2018, around the time of AFF’s 20th anniversary.
Listen now to AFF on AIR Episode 100: “The History of AFF”
You can also view the episode notes.
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