It's well known and thoroughly discussed that flights tend to be a fairly good way to spend QFF points and gift cards tend to be a poor choice. However, I find that the points conversion calculations for flights tend to be misleading given that flying via Qantas is overpriced to begin with. As an example, say I want to fly return to New York.
One option is for me to use QFF points at say 1 point = 1c value. The Qantas flight might cost me 120k points and the Qantas flight might be worth $1200 in value (excluding taxes and fees).
Another option is for me to find the best available deal (as any OzBargainer would), potentially with another airline. Let's just say there was a flight with Virgin going for $700 (excluding taxes and fees).
In this case, I would value the 120k points to be worth $700 (1 points = 0.58c value) rather than $1200 (1 point = 1c value). The example I gave is made up, but it's not hard to find a deal better than what Qantas offers. In fact, most deals and airlines are significantly cheaper than Qantas so the figures in my example are not far off.
My point is - comparing points this way leads to a very different points valuation outcome. So even for frequent international travellers (whose main objective is value and don't mind airline), there is some justification to use points on gift cards rather than flights. Domestic flights are a different story and are out of the scope of this discussion.
I'm fairly new to QFF and have not done extensive research but what do you guys think, do you agree or disagree? Let me know your experiences.
Redeeming reward flights with points really only makes sense if you're redeeming for premium cabins eg. Business or first class, where the dollar cost of such flights are very prohibitive but the equivalent points cost makes them attractive. The problem with doing this on QFF is that there is very limited availability of premium cabin reward seats on their flights, so you'll have to plan quite far ahead in order to secure those seats. Also, the tax portions of the reward flights are also very high, compared to other programmes, so you'll have to take that into account as well