Qantas FF announcement 20 June - "biggest overhaul" in program history

[downloadingdata]

My guesses:

Introduce EQD concept - good for domestic Y road warriors, terrible for everyone else
Raise the bar on P1 earn and permit access to CL and/or space available free upgrades
Introduce QF SC earn requirement for WP
SC earn based on origin and destination only - no benefit in flying indirectly
WP classic award requests become published benefit
SG classic award requests for Y/Y+
PS classic award requests for Y
Priority onboard toilet queue for WP/P1
SC deduction for taking any MH or QR flight

How do you deduct an already deducted SC earn on MH? Maybe negative SC! Fly MH to LHR and earn -120 SC in your account!

 

[TheInsider]

Could this be the start of things to come?

View attachment 171014

This is only to do with APAM taking over the lease from Qantas in Melbourne.

 

[RichardMEL]

Priorit toilet queue. That's the best one yet. Thanks for the giggle

 

[levelnine]

It will almost certainly be good news .... from a shareholder and analyst perspective. Isn't that why you roll out the CEO?

Exactly. Changes will be terrific for the profitability of QFF. Terrible for customers, especially savvy frequent flyers, but it will be spun as a positive for your Average Joe (it is easy to spin a revenue-based/dynamic-pricing earn/burn model as 'more seats available for redemption than ever!').

 

[Solid]

Maybe there are no enhancements decided yet - and they made this announcement so they could follow this thread to get ideas!

 

[markjb]

if they were doing away with SC why send targeted emails to certain members only a few weeks ago with double SC for bookings into next year......??

 

[TheInsider]

It's going around that there will be changes on how you earn status with how many points you can accrue.
There is said to be a lot of flyers that earn millions of points per year and create great revenue for Qantas and are only bronze, but they are not rewarded the way 'flyers' are. So I reckon something will change along those lines. All pure speculation though.

 

[ozflier]

All the more reason for them to be devalued.

I'd say at least a bump to 300K for a J award. Maybe much more.

In a sense, this is already happening .
Sure a J OWA is worth 280k but
you can never book all the flights at once so
little by little as they appear , you pay 5 k for each ticket change.

 

[kpc]

Also, there's every chance not all of the impending changes will be announced on Thursday. Have heard some may be held back until later in the year (read: depending on backlash).

Sorry, what I meant by that is that QF may announce a first raft of changes, await consumer response, and reevaluate before announcing the next planned batch (or shelve completely if everything goes cough up on the back of Thursday's announcement).

May not have explained that properly.

So there needs to be a BIG backlash after Thursday's announcement?!

 

[Mrmaxwell]

AJ did say in his recent Bloomberg video puff piece "my responsibility is to the board and the shareholders" and then a few remarks later "we try to improve profitability while not impacting the customer experience"

Can the two live in peace side by side?

 

[sudoer]

So there needs to be a BIG backlash after Thursday's announcement?!

AFF collective should max out our credit cards on flexible tickets and cancel them on Thursday at 10:31am?

 

[Pushka]

As it happens, on Thursday at 10:30 I will be in the MEL F lounge, so if the news is dire I will be able to drown my sorrows at QF's expense!

Oh. Didn’t you hear? No more F lounge unless flying F.

 

[downloadingdata]

AJ did say in his recent Bloomberg video puff piece "my responsibility is to the board and the shareholders" and then a few remarks later "we try to improve profitability while not impacting the customer experience"

Can the two live in peace side by side?

Well, some one is getting screwed at the end of the day, if its not the shareholders, their customers then it has to be their competitors ...

 

[ozflier]

AJ did say in his recent Bloomberg video puff piece "my responsibility is to the board and the shareholders" and then a few remarks later "we try to improve profitability while not impacting the customer experience"

Can the two live in peace side by side?

That does not appear to be the case when you look at the devaluation of domestic business class meals!

 

[Hoatzin]

Maybe a shared points currency like BA/IB ?

"Biggest overhaul in 32 years" does suggest something, well... big. It's not just gonna be a few more SCs needed to hit some target.

That would certainly be an interesting avenue to go down. It would make aligning with revenue based earning easier. With such similar partnerships though I doubt It'll be too crash hot if that is the case.

 

[Kiwi_Flyer]

Perhaps a private equity firm has made QF an offer they can't refuse to spin off QFF? (Would be consistent with inflation of elites through all the DSC offers.)

More optimistically, but not holding my breath, LTP?

 

[serfty]

"Biggest overhaul in 32 years" does suggest something

Having lived through a major change in 1998, a Huge devaluation in 2005 and more recently, "Simpler and Farter" ™ parts 1 and 2 more recently, It does suggest indeed something really really significant.

But, no - I expect (as usual) the hype of that sentence to exceed the actual reality.

 

[codash1099]

Maybe we are all too cynical

LTP
More FF seat availability
Reduced surcharges
Higher points earn/lower points needed
Logo change to flying pig.

 

[DavidFlynn]

AJ did say in his recent Bloomberg video puff piece "my responsibility is to the board and the shareholders" and then a few remarks later "we try to improve profitability while not impacting the customer experience"
Can the two live in peace side by side?

You mean, like ebony and ivory, side by side on my piano keyboard..?

Note that AJ said "We try", which is a qualifier, but yes, actually they can – not always easy, but definitely do-able. You can improve profitability and not impact the customer experience, there are even examples where the customer experience was improved while also saving money.

Cutting costs without cutting passenger experience: QF used to fly A330s SYD-MEL-PER with water tanks fully loaded. This meant using a lot of fuel to carry water which wasn't needed on the SYD-MEL leg. Decision was made to only fill the tanks to maybe 1/4 for SYD-MEL, which was still ample for what passengers needed on that short leg, and then fill 'em up for MEL-PER leg. Fuel saved, money saved, no impact to passengers.

Cutting costs and improving passenger experience: QF used to serve those individually platted little pats of butter in business class. The butter costs bugger all, but the overall human cost of preparing the platted pat was higher, it was more than the butter. QF switched to those little pre-wrapped Pepe Saya pats. They cost more than the 'old' butter pats but taste so much better, look better, but the key thing is that the overall human cost of preparation was reduced, and this being the more expensive component of the operation meant that QF saved some money (again, measured in a total operational sense) and improved the customer experience.

So, yeah, you can actually can costs without a negative customer experience – it's not always easy (although on reflection, the A330 water thing now seems bleedingly obvious!), which is why you don't often see it, as it's simpler just to swing the scythe through the spreadsheet - but it can be done.

 

[DavidFlynn]

Maybe we are all too cynical
LTP
More FF seat availability
Reduced surcharges
Higher points earn/lower points needed
Logo change to flying pig.

Bloody embargo breakers! Spoiling all the surprises! And how did you find out about the new logo???