Qantas Reveals 2025 Frequent Flyer Program Changes

Qantas today announced a large number of changes to its frequent flyer program, which will come into effect over the course of 2025.

The good news is that Qantas Frequent Flyer members will soon have access to Classic Reward seats on Hawaiian Airlines, as well as Premium Economy redemptions on four new partner airlines. Qantas will also increase the number of points that members earn from flying, and introduce the option to upgrade Jetstar long-haul flights using Qantas points.

The bad news is that Qantas will increase the number of points required for Classic Flight Rewards and Classic Upgrade Rewards. It will also hike up the carrier charges payable on Qantas international Classic Reward bookings in Business and First Class.

Here’s a full overview of Qantas’ 2025 program changes unveiled today…

Higher Classic Reward and upgrade prices on most routes and airlines

Unfortunately, one of the biggest changes is an increase in the number of Qantas points you’ll need to pay when booking Classic Flight Rewards on Qantas, Jetstar and other partner airlines. The cost of Oneworld Classic Flight Reward bookings will go up as well.

In addition, Qantas is increasing the number of points it’ll cost you to upgrade Qantas flights. The increases will generally be around 5-20%, depending on the route. However, while Qantas has already given a few examples of the new pricing, the airline won’t provide the full new charts until around May.

Qantas will also increase the cash component on Classic Reward bookings in Business and First Class on its own international flights, to match the higher amounts charged on Classic Plus redemptions.

While a price increase is never good, Qantas has at least given more than six months’ notice of these changes. The higher prices will only come into effect for bookings made from 5 August 2025. So, you’ll still have time to lock in redemptions at the lower existing rates once the full scale of the changes is made public in May.

Our separate article about the 2025 changes to Qantas Classic Reward and upgrade pricing has the full details.

The last time Qantas increased Classic Reward prices was in 2019. Even after these changes, Qantas Frequent Flyer believes it still competes strongly against Velocity Frequent Flyer.

“A lot has changed in the last six years. These adjustments will ensure we can continue to invest in enhancing the program for the long-term and continue to grow the levels of Classic and Classic Plus Reward seat availability for members year on year,” Qantas Loyalty CEO Andrew Glance said.

“With a number of airlines making changes to their loyalty programs recently, we wanted to give our members as much notice as possible so they can plan their future travel. That’s why our reward fare changes won’t come into effect for at least another six months.”

New redemption options on partner airlines

Unfortunately, the higher prices for Qantas Classic Reward bookings won’t come with a commensurate increase in availability on Qantas’ own flights.

However, from around October this year, Qantas Frequent Flyer will open up Economy and Business Class redemptions across the Hawaiian Airlines network. It will also finally allow Premium Economy redemptions on four existing partner airlines: Finnair, Iberia, Air France and KLM.

Qantas says that these additional redemption opportunities, such as Iberia Premium Economy, will open up around a million extra Classic Reward seats each year.

You can currently only use Qantas points to book Premium Economy seats on selected partner airlines.

Reduced Classic Reward pricing on some Jetstar and Emirates Economy flights

It’s not all doom and gloom, with some Classic Rewards becoming cheaper from August 2025.

One such reduction is Jetstar Economy redemptions on flights under 600 miles, which will drop from 6,400 to 5,700 points. (These are the only Jetstar rewards to get a price reduction, with all others increasing.)

This appears to be a direct response to Velocity Frequent Flyer recently reducing its minimum points cost for short domestic Economy redemptions to undercut Jetstar. Once Qantas Frequent Flyer makes this change to Jetstar pricing – even though it’s only for Zone 1 rewards – it will once again be able to say it has the cheapest reward flights in Australia.

“We’re also introducing the lowest reward seat fare in Australia, with Jetstar seats for 5,700 points on all short haul domestic routes like Sydney to the Gold Coast and Melbourne to Adelaide, helping members get away faster. This is just the beginning of a broader suite of changes to Jetstar rewards that will deliver even greater value for members in 2025 and beyond,” Glance said.

Meanwhile, Emirates redemptions will be moved back onto the Qantas Classic Flight Reward table from the higher-priced partner airline pricing table. While there will still be an overall increase in points costs for Emirates Business and First Class redemptions, Economy Class rates will see a slight reduction.

There are unfortunately no changes to Emirates’ ridiculously high carrier charges.

Ability to upgrade Jetstar flights with Qantas points

While this won’t take effect until 2026, Qantas has promised that frequent flyers will finally be able to upgrade using their points on Jetstar Boeing 787 flights.

Currently, Qantas is reluctant to allow this because Jetstar only has 21 Business Class seats on its Boeing 787s – and these often sell out. But with Jetstar more than doubling the number of Business Class seats on its 787s when it refurbishes its planes from next year, there will soon be more seats to go around.

We don’t yet know how many Qantas points you’ll need to upgrade a Jetstar flight.

Higher points earning for Qantas flights

In another positive change, Qantas will increase the number of points that members can earn for flying on Qantas by around 25% from July 2025. For example, the number of Qantas points you would earn for a one-way Economy flight from Melbourne to Perth will increase from 1,450 to 1,815.

These increases should apply when flying Jetstar as well, if you’ve purchased a bundle that lets you earn points and status credits.

The airline will also remove the current Status Bonus cap, whereby frequent flyers with status who are flying in a premium cabin only earn bonus points based on the “flexible economy” earn rate. This cap was one of the infamous “simpler and fairer” changes that Qantas originally introduced back in 2014.

At an aggregate level, Qantas believes that this change will allow members to earn around 4 billion more points each year.

Currently, less than half of Qantas points earned by members each year are from flights.

More changes coming later in 2025?

Some of the changes announced today to Qantas Classic Reward pricing appear to be a direct response to the recent Velocity Frequent Flyer changes.

But redemption pricing wasn’t the only change that Velocity announced in late 2024. Velocity’s other key change was to the way status credits are earned on Virgin Australia.

With Velocity soon to start awarding status credits based on how much you spend, there has been some speculation that Qantas could soon look to do the same.

Although Qantas has not announced any changes to status credits or tier benefits today, we understand that more changes to the Qantas Frequent Flyer program could be on the way later in 2025. For now, watch this space…

What do you make of these Qantas program changes?

What do you think about these changes? Do they make you more or less likely to want to collect Qantas points?

Share your thoughts and join the discussion on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum:

Matt Graham

The editor of Australian Frequent Flyer, Matt's passion for travel has taken him to over 90 countries… with the help of frequent flyer points, of course!
Matt's favourite destinations (so far) are Germany, Brazil & Kazakhstan. His interests include aviation, economics & foreign languages, and he has a soft spot for good food and red wine.

You can connect with Matt by posting on the Australian Frequent Flyer community forum and tagging @AFF Editor.