Qantas Hotels has opened up its points earning to all hotels booked through the booking site. This is a change from the previous practice of only providing points when booking so-called partner hotels through the booking engine.
While Qantas often touted that you would earn points when booking though Qantas Hotels, this was only true for a minority of the hotels that you could book. While there were (according to Qantas) over 140,000 hotels available to book, you would only earn points at around 13,000 of the hotels on offer.
Under the new change, the remaining 127,000 or so hotels become eligible to earn 3 points per dollar.
While a good change, the real value of Qantas Hotels comes into play when Qantas run various bonus point promotions. For example, they run double point promotions on occasion. Even better, they have got up to a point where they have offered 12 Qantas Points per dollar.
It is during these promotions that Qantas Hotels starts to be better than some of the other booking channels out there. At the standard 3 points per dollar, some of the cashback sites can return a greater amount to you. When you are getting 12 points per dollar through Qantas Hotels, the equation can swing back to favouring Qantas Hotels.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether these promotions will apply to the full range of hotels in the future, but it is crtainly worth keeping an eye out for them.