Qantas passengers furious after frequent flyer points vanish
Qantas has been slammed by shocked passengers who claim their frequent flyer points have vanished from their accounts.
People aren’t only angry about Qantas’s rule that sees frequent flyer points expire after 18 months of inactivity, others claim they are victims of the air carrier’s decision that they didn’t know about.
Back in 2016, Qantas and Woolworths made a deal for the Woolworths Rewards program. Under the changes, the default option for Qantas passengers changed to earning discounts with the supermarket instead of frequent flyer points. People wishing to continue earning Qantas points while shopping at Woolworths needed to manually change their options in their account.
Although Qantas maintains the change was well publicised at the time and they emailed all customers, some passengers say they weren’t informed or that the email had ended up in spam folder. They also questioned why Qantas didn’t call or text their customers.
Instead passengers found out this year they had not been earning any points since the change and thus they had expired. For some people, they lost hundreds of thousands of points, worth thousands of dollars.
One passenger wrote on the Qantas Facebook page of their loss: “Qantas wiped 360,000 points from me, all accumulated from fifo work, only contacted by email when they wiped my account, very disappointed Qantas.”
Another said: “Qantas the reason most people lost their points was when Woolworths stop(ped) their rewards points system. If Qantas was reasonable they would do the right thing by these people.”
Qantas has repeatedly told customers they don’t give back expired points.
A spokesperson said: “It’s really easy to stay active in the Qantas Frequent Flyer program — it’s as simple as earning or redeeming one Qantas Point within 18 months.
“Even if members aren’t flying regularly there are a variety of ways to earn or use points on the ground through everyday spend using a Qantas Points-earning credit cards, buying a burger or watching a movie at the cinema.”