Reward yourself ..... or Reward Qantas?

[Moody]

I was scanning my latest points balance and news email from QFF, and amongst the various ads and promotions was a "Where can I go with my points?" section. Now I redeem points fairly regularly (including trips to the UK/Europe every 2-3 years) but I was shocked to see the price tag for a Sydney London classic award was 128000 points and $1096!!!

For the period they were promoting (Feb to May 2013) you can pick up an economy fare for under $1800 which would make the taxes and surcharges about 61% of the fare. Conversely your so-called "award" flight should really be called the 39% award flight, 'coz the rest you need to shell out for in cash.

Of course for another 100K points you can pick up an ASA which brings the whole deal back to the good-old days of award flights - when the points covered most if not all of the cost. Nice bracket creep!

 

[harvyk]

Y class tends to be pretty bad value for reward flights. I tend to only use points for Y rewards if I need to do the trip, but don't have the money available to do so, where by the choice was fly Y on point ignore the exceptionally bad spend rate on the points, or simply forgo the trip full stop.

It's interesting to note, that for often not many more points, and the same cash component, Y+ \ J can be had as an award.

 

[dajop]

I was scanning my latest points balance and news email from QFF, and amongst the various ads and promotions was a "Where can I go with my points?" section. Now I redeem points fairly regularly (including trips to the UK/Europe every 2-3 years) but I was shocked to see the price tag for a Sydney London classic award was 128000 points and $1096!!!

For the period they were promoting (Feb to May 2013) you can pick up an economy fare for under $1800 which would make the taxes and surcharges about 61% of the fare. Conversely your so-called "award" flight should really be called the 39% award flight, 'coz the rest you need to shell out for in cash.

Yeh economy redemptions are useless. It's rather pathetic that gift vouchers at BIG W are more valuable to use points on than redemptions on QF!

Do the math .... $100 voucher = 13,500 pts. So the 128,000 pts you spend gets $950 at Big W, yet on QF only $704, and of course if you buy the fare you get 20,000 pts for the travel.

But still it least it has a positive value. Sometimes you see redemptions on QF code on JQ (charging QF surcharges), where the surcharges are more than the fare JQ charges itself for the same flight! Have seen this on MEL/SIN several times.