As someone who follows loyalty program tweaks/changes/promos a little too obsessively and finds their mechanics fascinating, I really enjoyed the recent episode with David Feldman.
I agree with the comments at the end of the show about Velocity starting to look more appealing - once they have the QR and NH partnerships (if it ever happens?) established they'll offer decent partner coverage of Europe, North & South Asia, and North America. As long as they ramp up frequencies of their own metal to NZ/South Pacific in due course, they would have most major business destinations covered. It might even be enough for jaded QFF Golds to consider switching to VA - the type who are sick of the abysmal call centre experience (both hold times and incompetent off-shore staff), the removal of lounge service desks, the struggle to find decent QF J awards at 353 days, and the published but undelivered benefits like priority boarding/baggage.
For most travel patterns VA Plat is about as easy to attain/retain as QF Gold, in some cases easier with family pooling. Fly Ahead and Economy X are quite attractive benefits, they really just need to make the international partner lounge entitlements clearer/more consistent, and bring in some form of lifetime status. If your usual QF SC earn was around the 650-700 mark each year I think it would then be quite easy to justify a switch to VA.
IMO the most interesting QFF value proposition is a combination of WP & Points Club Plus. A 100 SC head start each year, combined with QF classic award requests on which you can earn SC (and even DSC) makes retaining WP quite a bit easier. PC+ means churning 2-3 cards annually for most people and results in accruing quite a few QFF points, but if you have confidence that you can burn them on the routes/dates you want AND they count towards your WP retain target I think it would appeal to a 650-700 SC per year flyer as a stretch goal.
Great thoughts
Most of my travel is leisure and I have a wife and 2 kids - so the family pooling of SC means Velocity is a no brainer for us.
Plus we get economy x so little ones can sit / move around in front of us in row 3, and various combos of us / kids are always up and down out of seats
Currently my wife is also a companion platinum as I did a year with lots of business travel added in 2019
Lounges are comparable in my view
Virgin catering in economy is basically nothing but you can stock up in the lounge and it’s only if flying more than 2 hours I feel the need for food
The redemption situation for long haul business seems bleak across both programs at present (!) I have flown
etihad to Europe in business (2 seats only then) using velocity points in 2016 which was great. Qatar partnership a very intriguing development for me. Doubt I’ll ever get the 4 seats we need as a family anywhere in business moving forward and that’s not unreasonable in my view (we do have 4 domestic business seats on VA MEL-BNE-TSV for free under a promo for platinums which I find hilarious we will have half the cabin with our 5 and 2 yo in tow)
The call centre is a big problem with Qantas even as a gold according to AFF forums (I’m just a lowly bronze). As platinum virgin I get fast, knowledgeable, excellent service (recently they let me get off the phone while they did all the computer work across 3 bookings and of course it actually ticketed and no need to call back!)
Lastly, a potential combo strategy - I accidentally got points club with Qantas because I switched a commbank credit card to QFF points and all the accumulated commbank points were converted into QFF on switching. This got me enough for points club with lounge access
So that’s an interesting combo - you can basically have platinum with VA and also do a credit card churn to get points club for lounge access with QF
For me I can’t be bothered churning cards, but it’s a little bonus til next year to have lounge access when I finally use that QF travel credit I have…