Qantas Frequent Flyers used more than one billion points to book international reward seats following the launch of Classic Plus Flight Rewards on Monday. According to Qantas, this is three times the average number of points typically spent on a Monday.
This is just one of the interesting snippets of information Qantas released on Wednesday.
Qantas also provided a bit of a breakdown on the way their frequent flyers spent their points:
- London, Singapore, Tokyo, Queenstown, and Los Angeles were the most popular destinations to book,
- Almost 50% of the Classic Plus Rewards flights were in premium cabins
- Some examples of Classic Plus bookings on day one, include:
- Three frequent flyers booked Canberra to Queenstown for the winter ski season for 26,000 points each in Economy.
- One frequent flyer booked Melbourne to Singapore return at Christmas time for 215,500 points flying Business outbound and Economy inbound.
- A family of four booked Sydney to Auckland return during the July school holidays for 253,000 points flying Business (less than the 332,000 points to book as a Classic).
Classic Plus Rewards
The launch of Classic Plus Rewards was a move to assist customers that had become increasingly frustrated with the difficulty of redeeming points for flights. Under the new program. the airline made an extra 20 million reward seats a year available on its flights.
These additional seats are available in any class and are linked to the cost of the ticket.
While they are not usually as cheap as the Classic Rewards, they do have greater availability. While there are more of them, they do come at a higher price (usually). This can be up to three times the points cost.
Thoughts
The response to the launch of Classic Plus Rewards was interesting. Perhaps, to the hard-core point-hacker it was a disappointing development. Indeed, some view it as a bit of a sleight of hand.
However, the response on Monday suggests there was a pent-up demand for flight redemptions. It’s a bit hard to know what 1 billion points means in terms of numbers of flights. If we can assume 100,000 points per flight, that’s 10,000 flights.
How this plays out going forward remains to be seen.
