The current Qantas points earning credit card offers are pretty abysmal. Are you still bothering with churning for Qantas points, or have you moved on to a different rewards program? I'm trying to decide whether it's still worth the hassle and the annual fees.
Are You Still Bothering with Qantas Points or Have You Moved on to a Different Rewards Program?
CatGrandma on 10/09/2025 - 13:59
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I've stopped. The new Qantas rewards require more points and have more restrictions on the bookings, cancellations/changes within a certain period forfeit all the points spent of the tickets. I don't plan to do a lot of travel for a while and have used pretty much all of my remaining points up on a trip in Jan.
For the past year I've gone through most of the banks other rewards systems, essentially rather than earning Qantas points, I've been running through every banks rewards systems for bonus signup offers and taking gift cards for supermarkets instead. Not the best in terms of redemption value, but for the outlay in terms of annual fees (some with no annual fees) I'm thousands ahead and had very little grocery costs for quite a while.
For example, ANZ Rewards Black. $375 fee, I think at the time it was $200 credit back once you hit spend criteria. 180k points and redeemed $800 in Aldi gift cards. So for an outlay of around $175, I received $800 in gift cards that I used with each of my large grocery shops. I've churned through ANZ, NAB, CBA and most recently BOQ and Kogan. I'm planning to keep the Kogan card now though.
I had a great run this year and still think it's worthwhile, although much harder than it used to be.
400,000 points on CC's for myself - gives me Points Club + (Free Qantas lounge membership), and worth around $5500.
I moved to another program years ago and stopped accumulating Qantas points for many reasons, including devaluation. Also, Classic Plus is a scam, designed to rob points from those who “don’t know what to do with the point” and that’s the reason they no longer release classic rewards, it’s all slowly disappearing.
Its a tough one, I feel that Qantas and Virgin both oversaturated the marker of points balances because its like printing money and extremely profitable for them. Now we have everyone with hundreds of thousands or millions of points and you find that availability of seats is too scarce.
Honestly I reckon Qantas needs to introduce points expiry or something like that or it will come back to eventually bite them.
They lean heavily on the marketing around being able to fly for free with points but you have enough people realising that its actually impossible to effectively use them and then the sentiment and value people place on the points goes away.
still worth it imo