QF flight credit with QF Amex Ultimate card is a swizz!

[Palyadoc]

What a swizz the Amex/Qantas travel credit deal is these days if you hold a QF Amex Ultimate card. Same flights; more than twice the price via the Amex portal for the same date/class/flight as on the QF site. Its always been the same or maybe a few dollars more which was ok. I wanted to use my $450 credit for one of these flights but not to end up paying way over the odds by doing so. It used to be so much better when you didn't have to book via their portal and just got reimbursed if you used the card. Now its just a rip off. Needless to say I booked via the QF website. I will have to think about whether to renew this card; whilst it has other benefits, this one is no longer one of them IMHO. Of course the webpage makes it all sound so rosy.

How to Use Your Qantas Travel Credit | Amex Travel Australia

Learn more about how to redeem your Qantas Travel Credit with American Express Travel. Log in and use your Travel Credit on your next Qantas flight booking.

www.americanexpress.com

 

[Kerrodt]

This is quite common on the Amex website now. It isn't really directly related to the travel voucher because when you do the flight search on the Amex site you have not yet told the system that you want to pay by voucher. At this point you could be doing a cash paid fare for all the system knows. So you would get screwed over either way - cash or travel voucher.

It seems to be more related to the possibility that Amex don't hold/aren't allocated/ don't or won't display enough of the fares in the lower priced fare buckets that you can still see on the QF site, or they are internally allocating the lower priced fare buckets to their corporate Amex travel clients, or some other dark and mysterious reason.

No matter what the underlying reason, as you point out, it detracts from the attractiveness of this card product.

And to be honest, I haven't seen such a wide disparity is fare prices to what you have identified here - that is pretty horrendous IMO.

 

[defurax]

There's the explanation as to why in this thread: Changes to how you use your $450 Travel Credit

Although it would be nice to be able to use the $450 credit on cheap domestic business fare, I usually end up using mine on short domestic route for last minute trip.

 

[Palyadoc]

Ok thanks for that explanation. Its certainly explains why the price differential is there - does not make it right though!