Invited to participate in a QF Loyalty Virtual Focus group

[Seat0B]

That is entirely within QRs control nothing QF can do to force QR to release awards on their metal. If redeeming on QR is your ultimate goal best to join their FFP and credit all your OW flights there.



100% this! If you get seriously ill you can be in hospital for months undergoing treatment and then have to isolate or wait for clearance to fly. Obviously need some strict rules about proof, a GP letter shouldnt cut it all people will try and scam an extension; but a certified letter from oncologist would be a good start.

My main feedback would be:

1. To improve website and app so that users can self serve booking and making changes to complex itineraries and so that it supports being able to accommodate sufficient legs per OWA limits. An add leg button under MMB would be fabulous.

2. Call back feature for Premium line or guarantee if waiting on hold that status pax will get the onshore (or NZ) premium call centres. Of course bringing all call centres all back to Aus and NZ would be better; then all the bs lines from staff who dont understand reward offerings and fare rules would disappear in an instant. The offshore companies they use are woeful.

Great suggestions I will add to my list

 

[Mr H]

@Seat0B Maybe a status hold benefit for serious illness could be relevant to you and worth suggesting, similar to what's offered already to new parents

This could be achieved by allowing status holders a one-time only "reawaken status challenge" - where members could have a status that has lapsed within the last three-or-so years reinstated on a temporary and limited basis with a challenge of taking so many flights during that temporary awakening in order to have it fully reinstated. This would allow people who have stopped flying for whatever reason (health, family, employment changes, etc.) to come back into the fold when their frequent travel resumes. It shouldn't really matter to QF what the reasons for the pause might have been - they should just want to get their valued customer back.

 

[Lynda2475]

Noting that QF already do status match challenges over a 90 day period to win ba ck customers who have gone to the competition.

 

[Mr H]

Noting that QF already do status match challenges over a 90 day period to win ba ck customers who have gone to the competition.

That was my thinking. Except this one would not require anyone to have been flying with the opposition - just to have previously flown frequently with Qantas. There would be little point in using the challenge if you weren't going to resume frequent flying, and it just cuts out a lengthy qualification period for those who will - so it might be and incentive for someone resuming their flying to pick Qantas rather than any other airline.

On the disadvantage side, Qantas might feel that this could reduce the incentive for someone to stay on the wheel when their personal circumstances get tough.

But I bet, overall, the benefits of returning customers would outweigh then cost of those who see it as a licence to drop out.

 

[kangarooflyer88]

Remind me again: What's "World Platinum"?

Qantas World Platinum is officially called Qantas Platinum but I and other people I know refer to it as World Platinum given the many benefits such status unlocks globally.

Canadians are very polite!

Some are.

Mostly, but have you ever been to a (ice) hockey game?

Uhh that's hockey game to you, mate! There is only one type of hockey out there, it is played with a stick, on ice, and with a puck. Also yes hockey is way more aggressive than the sports here in Australia:

Access to QR J reward seats even with QR's own Avios has hugely dried up over the last few months. Thought initially this was a Euro summer availability thing, but it's continued throughout September 2024. So less than zero chance for QFF even if there was some miraculous easing of relations.

I don't know if OneWorld has a specific policy that requires airlines to offer the same award availability to their partners as their own customers, but I suspect most airlines will release the most availability to their own frequent flyers, then put whatever remnants they want to their partners. The other thing to realize too is Qatar doesn't fly a lot to Australia. They're at what 21 flights a week across the capital cities (i.e. one flight a day)? Contrast that with an outfit like Singapore which has way more frequency to/from Australia.

Where I think there should be some huffing and puffing from us frequent flyers is with Emirates. They fly a decent amount to Australia and often have award availability open, but the taxes and fees make these "free" tickets far from free. It would be nice to see a royal commission on air surcharges to deal with this.

-RooFlyer88

 

[RooFlyer]

Also yes hockey is way more aggressive than the sports here in Australia:

I was actually talking about the spectators! Loved Don Cherry's Hockey Night in Canada. Apologies for the o/t @Seat0B .

 

[RichardMEL]

Qantas World Platinum is officially called Qantas Platinum but I and other people I know refer to it as World Platinum given the many benefits such status unlocks globally.

No. it's just you. Nobody else. Unless you have some sort of multiple personality disorder of course......

 

[Seat0B]

Qantas World Platinum is officially called Qantas Platinum but I and other people I know refer to it as World Platinum given the many benefits such status unlocks globally.

No. it's just you. Nobody else.

WP is not an abbreviation for World Platinum. It's something else entirely - hence my comment about politeness

 

[am0985]

I don't know if OneWorld has a specific policy that requires airlines to offer the same award availability to their partners as their own customers, but I suspect most airlines will release the most availability to their own frequent flyers, then put whatever remnants they want to their partners. The other thing to realize too is Qatar doesn't fly a lot to Australia. They're at what 21 flights a week across the capital cities (i.e. one flight a day)? Contrast that with an outfit like Singapore which has way more frequency to/from Australia.

Where I think there should be some huffing and puffing from us frequent flyers is with Emirates. They fly a decent amount to Australia and often have award availability open, but the taxes and fees make these "free" tickets far from free. It would be nice to see a royal commission on air surcharges to deal with this.

-RooFlyer88

Pre pandemic you'd usually see the same availability for a lot of OW airlines as on their own award schemes - eg CX. Suspect that's changing as scarcity is greater.

Qatar's reduced availability is across the board and to pretty much every destination and wasn't this bad 4-5 months ago. If there are J seats they're only available on 2X points. Seems suspicious they announced a transfer bonus just prior to effectively launching a huge devaluation by the back door.

 

[Mr H]

No. it's just you. Nobody else.

Which is where the W in WP comes in...

 

[Lynda2475]

Where I think there should be some huffing and puffing from us frequent flyers is with Emirates. They fly a decent amount to Australia and often have award availability open, but the taxes and fees make these "free" tickets far from free.

But those fees are set by EK and passed on by QF. EK awards have expensive fees even when redeemed directly with EK or other partners.

 

[MARTINE]

WP is not an abbreviation for World Platinum. It's something else entirely - hence my comment about politeness

The gift that keeps on giving…

 

[RichardMEL]

Alliances don't require individual airlines to provide the same availability to partners for a couple of reasons that I am aware of. One, while airlines may be members of an alliance (eg: oneworld, Star, Skyteam) or even a more loose arrangement (eg: VA and AC/SQ/UA/NH/EY/QR...) as I understand it these all end up being partnership agreements between *individual* airlines within a grouping. Now, a global alliance may provide the framework and standards for such agreements, but at the core there are individual agreements between airlines. This is how you can get situations where some subgroups can have differing, yet aligned, policies (think of AA/CX/BA -> FJ as example) or, indeed, differing policies within an alliance groups. However, things lie codeshares, FF links (earning, burning, lounge access etc) end up being between airlines.

While I do believe the major alliances have minimum levels of requirements for things like status recognition and so on, the reality is that you can and do see differences all over the place. And, preferences are made between members of airline groups - look at how UA has "preferred" partner groups vs "others" that affect elite qualifying calculations, and various airlines can and DO have varying availability for FF rewards - for example SQ very specifically block J and F on certain aircraft types to UA, but may offer same rewards to AC, or only to their on members (eg: SQ Suites) - AF does te same for it's F product too iirc. ANd of course, with QF and partners like QR, MH and others we all know the differences in earning, burning and availability. Some driven by iner-airline agreeemnts and some by sheer hubris (at least that's how it seems for some).

And let's not forget, the whole point of these alliances are to drive traffic between and through members via a framework. While it might make some sense for a global alliance to want more equal and equivalent things between members like availability of FF seats etc - it's not something they probably really care about (and also some of it would be commercial in confidence too). Individual partners can still control inventory, capacity, routes and how they treat partner customers pretty much as they like - again with some basic minimum requirements.

I remember when Star wanted to align booking class codes across all the carriers so it would be consistent and make sense - and in the beginning it did kind of happen that way more or less and was quite good, but of course it was never going to last as new products came onliune, airlines wanted to use various booking classes for their own (and different to others) things and so on.. these days, iirc, that's not really a thing any more.

Anyway I don't think it will ever happen. Alliances are about pooling and directing traffic and trying to keep customers in the same ecosystem to improve yields for all.. but individual members still can and do compete within the alliances (unless in some sort of JV arrangement) so all of those play out at a level above the alliuance wide one.

my 43 cents worth.

 

[Franky]

WP is not an abbreviation for World Platinum. It's something else entirely - hence my comment about politeness

Think merchant banker...

 

[TheInsider]

Think merchant banker...

Or Ship's Anchor, one I've heard before somewhere.

 

[Cognac]

Just my two cents, but I think it's worth mentioning the usability of the website.

Searching for flights, booking, redeeming, changing, doesn't matter. It's pretty awful. If they fixed the user experience on their website they'd reduce the call centre volume, so it's a win-win. And if customers could easily search and book reward flights there'd be a lot less complaining about the "junk" status of frequent flyer points at the moment.

 

[Seat0B]

As promised, here is the list of things I have collated from this thread.

I am not sure whether I will get the chance to mention any of these, or if the whole thing will be tightly stage managed and controlled. I will report back after tomorrow.

I decided not to do a poll as on investigation, you can only choose a single answer and I don't think that represents what people were saying.

• Incentives for LTG to work to retain Platinum each year eg starting each membership year with credit of 600 SC for LTG recognition.
• Status hold for serious long term health issues.
• A “re-awaken status challenge” for status holders who previously held a status within the past couple of years but lapsed due to change in flying pattern can have a challenge to reinstate.
• Improve the web site so that people can self serve for things like making more complex bookings, changing award and other bookings, linking bookings, accommodating enough legs to use OWA limits. An “add leg” button in MMB.
• Improve usability for web site, especially for searching for flights, redeeming awards etc.
• More call centres in Australia, or overseas centres that can action issues and don’t just make up stupid lies, like there are no flights between CBR and SYD on that date or you are seeing phantom flights/awards (not true as HBA agent was able to book it 5 minutes after I hung up and called again).
• Call back option when waiting on hold.
• Guarantee that premium members will get a capable call centre.
• Family pooling of points/SC as per Virgin.
• Improve the benefits for PC and PC+ members with more opportunities to earn SC.
• Guaranteed upgrades linked to loyalty bonus achievement each 500 SC (Ok to block out peak travel times eg business hours on golden triangle or school holidays).
• For PC+ - if already a tiered member with lounge access, the ability to gift the QC membership to someone else.
• Some new OWA that allows use of all OWA and Partner airlines even if at a higher points cost than a standard OWA.
• Access to QR J award flights.

 

[Seat0B]

Warning: Long post summarising the focus group.

OK, well that was interesting.

There were 6 of us on the call (plus the facilitator from an outside market research company). 4 x platinum and 2 x gold FF, 3 x PC+ and 3 x PC. Age range from 30s-70s. Three working, 2 retired and me (semi-retired). The main focus of the call was improvements to PC and PC+ - which is a pity as although that certainly needs improvement, it's definitely not my main gripe with QF. It was quite tightly stage managed, but still, I managed to get in a few points from the list above, and interestingly enough, there was a very clear agreement amongst all of us on the call on similar points.

They asked us how we came to know about PC and PC+

• For all of us it was not an active thing, we just got notified we had achieved it.

They asked us how much effort we made to keep PC and PC+

• For all except one the answer was not much effort at all, because the benefits are so marginal when you are a higher tier FF as well that it isn't really attractive to make an effort. We did however all agree that the various SC benefits of PC and PC+ such as the SC rollover for PC+ and the SC on CR seats for PC and PC+ did make it generally attractive and that if these benefits were improved/increased we would be likely to try harder. Four of us managed to get into the conversation that getting SC on CR seats was only going to work if you could actually get an award seat, and that at the moment that was all but impossible. Actually that point was made several times over the course of the focus group.
• Several people also noted that the points levels needed were getting harder to achieve given the recent round of devaluations of credit card points earning, and the tigher conditions impacting credit card churning and the three retirees also pointed out that credit cards are not really an option in retirement.

We were then asked questions about whether we used each of the benefits of PC and PC+.

• For most of us the answer was "no, because I already get this some other way" eg QP invitations or QP membership not relevant to status fliers, Accor ALL silver irrelevant to most as already have Accor Gold from previous promo, Accor Advantage plus or enjoy status with other hotel groups, Avis upgrade not especially attractive and the one person who had tried to use was refused by Avis, $50 wine voucher not really useful as most of us only buy QF wine on discount and therefore can't use the voucher which is only for non-sale items, $50 hotel voucher also not really useful as most time QF Hotels are more expensive than other providers.

They asked us to suggest things that would make us want to make an effort to keep PC/PC+ or upgrade between PC and PC+ and some good suggestions were made by the group. These included:

• make SC rollover 100 SC for PC and 200 SCfor PC+.
• give a loyalty bonus offer for PC in the same way as given for FF - so say every 50,000 points you could choose 8,000 FF points or 50SC.
• provide earlier access to CR seats - only 2 supported this - the rest of us did not want to be competing with an even bigger pool of people to get those unicorn J international seats. This led to a lot of discussion about the need for better seat availability, and I got to slip in "yeah no one really wants all those economy reward seats on Jetstar between MEL and OOL". This was immediately picked up by the others who basically said yep, totally agree, international J is what we want.
• first class lounge invitations.
• one chance each year, say for birthday or PC/PC+ anniversary to make a personalised DSC booking - for PC this could be domestic maybe and for PC+ international.
• ability to make changes/cancellations to CR bookings without paying the points penalty at least for 1 or 2 bookings per year.
• ability to gft any of the PC/PC+ benefits to a family member.

The we were shown a prepared list of "enhancements" being considered by QF. These included:

• merchandise to celebrate achievement of PC/PC+ such as key ring, PJs etc. This was not attractive to anyone in the group "I already get this" "I don't want more branded junk"
• personal greeting by cabin crew for PC PC+. This was not well received with everyone agreeing that the current greetings are cringe worthy and don't add any value at all, and often just done "performatively to tick a box". We all agreed that something better would be a glass of better wine, some food from a higher cabin or similar.
• Amenities kit when flying Y on a flight with premium cabins. All except one thought this was a fair enough idea, and similar to the suggestions already made in relation to the personal greeting.
• Better discount on points flights (both points plus pay and CR) - but level of discount not revealed. People thought this was a good concept, but likely to be mean and scrimpy and not of any real attraction given the low levels of other points/discounts offered.
• Priority boarding for PC/PC+. This was widely rejected as "soon the whole plane will be priority boarding" and "QF can't ven manage the current priority boarding, why make it worse".
• Points millionaires to get P1. This generated a lot of discussion. Does this mean a points balance of 1 million or that ypu have to earn 1 million in a year? The consultant said it was a points balance of 1 million. Well I'd be in favour of that - but I'm pretty sure that is not what they mean. Most of the focus group also thought it was likely to be earn 1 million in a year, which several then equated to the total insulting irrelvance of the illusion of LTP and the inability of almost anyone to actually achieve this. However, one person said it made sense to them that it was the points balance because that would mean that people would then want to keep a balance of 1 million points to keep P1. Therefore the demand for ways to spend points would decline and everyone would be better off, including Qantas as they would not have to give up much to lock up a million points that could otherwise be exchanged for a whole lot of J and F international flights (assuming you could get them). People with fewer points might decide to save them to get to the million mark. And those who wanted to spend their points would now have less competition for the available seats. I quite liked this way of thinking, and I hope QF does too (she says with a very healthy points balance, and also Mr Seat 0A). I wonder how many people actually have 1 million or more points? I'm sure a lot here do, but overall, I wonder how many. On FB I see so many posts with people saying "I have a heap of points, almost 200k" so maybe there are not that many with million or multi-million point balances?
• Free subscription to AFR (yes really!!!)/Australian/SMH. This was rejected as not much value and the group said, but a free subscription to a decent streaming platform would be attractive.
• Valet parking vouchers.
• And I forget the rest, but honestly they were not particularly attractive.
• We were asked to specify our favourite 3 things, and I have highlighted the ones that were mentioned by the group.

Next we were shown some more ideas by QF which basically involved allowing the PC/PC+ member to select any 2 of a list of the current benefits such as hotel voucher, wine voucher, or new benefits such as car rental discount voucher, insurance discount voucher, 2 x hoyts movie tickets, Westfield valet parking, QF valet parking. Voucher value was $50 for PC and $100 for PC+. PC+ also got a QP membership or 150,000 points, or an unspecified number of SC or an unspecified number of First Lounge invitations. The also suggested a loyalty bonus at 250,000 points - 2,500 points or 10 SC.

• The group thought that overall it was attractive to be able to select the benefit you wanted.
• The group thought that overall these benefits were pretty cheap and nasty given how much you have to spend to get PC or PC+ membership especially if you cannot do the credit card churning. One member of the group pointed out that for 500 SC of flying you currently get an offer of 8000 points or 50 SC and that this was nowhere near what was being offered for the improved PC/PC+ (2500 points of 10 SC).

At the end we were asked again how much effort we would put into achieving/maintaining/upgrading PC or PC+. No one had changed their opening position which was basically "meh - if I get it I get it, it's OK, but I would not really exert myself to get/maintain or upgrade." Other comments were along the lines of "just stop with the shopping list of bitsy offers that aren't attractive and have 3 or 4 really fantastic benefits that wow people into spending their cash in ways that generate QF points" and I said that in fact I now felt more negative than when I started the session today. This is true as I realised how much money has to be spent these days to generate 150,000 QF FF points, and then they offer me a bunch of things I already get (lounge access, Accor ALL silver), don't want (Avis upgrade, piddling discounts on their overpriced online store, voucher on overpriced hotels) or can't use ( wine discount, QF travel insurance - my pre-existing conditions are not all covered, and my free credit card insurance is actually better value plus covers all conditions except the recent leukaemia). The only actual benefit I get as PC, and I do value it, is the SC earn on CR flights, but realistically I would be better to just spend money and buy flights and get the full SC. And it is really, really hard to get those CR flights in the first place, so.....

I hope this summary is of interest to the group, and happy to keep the conversation going on here if people are keen.

 

[Lynda2475]

Thanks for the update that was really interesting and a great summary.

I suspect most people with 1million + points balance earn a good bulk of those from QBR or running business expenses through a points earning card. An individual who works for someone else even on a high salary isn't likely to earn 1 million annually without churning lost of black/platinum cards and the exclusion periods make this more difficult to sustain.

As someone who lost their hard earned points when Ansett died, I personally try to spend mine as soon as I have 318k for a OWA in J.

 

[Princess Fiona]

Thanks for the update that was really interesting and a great summary.

I suspect most people with 1million + points balance earn a good bulk of those from QBR or running business expenses through a points earning card. An individual who works for someone else even on a high salary isn't likely to earn 1 million annually without churning lost of black/platinum cards and the exclusion periods make this more difficult to sustain.

As someone who lost their hard earned points when Ansett died, I personally try to spend mine as soon as I have 318k for a OWA in J.

And some of the really big points whales burn them on F points plus pay.
Have met quite a few of those onboard.
They all have big businesses and QBR etc.

Personally I think P1 should be the same as other QFF levels and reserved for BIS activities only.
I would not be happy if they allowed this. I also think 1 million points is actually at the lower end of the scale of what some of these businesses are earning once you factor in QBR etc.