I’m just getting started and was hoping for some feedback on my plan.
My partner has Qantas Platinum status (she travels a lot for work), and so I am going with the Qantas frequent flyer program.
I will be buying a new car in the next 2 months or so for about $20K and will be flying to Japan early 2024 and a domestic flight (melb - gold coast maybe) in mid 2024. I’m hoping to use points to cover these flights.
My plan is to use sign up bonuses to get points and put the car on these to cover the minimum spend requirements, pay these off using money I have sitting in the bank, then keep one or two cards open for everyday spending. Every year I’ll churn a few cards to get sign up bonus.
I was thinking of applying for these three cards:
ANZ Frequent Flyer Black
Qantas Premier Platinum
Qantas American express ultimate
A few questions:
Is three cards too many to apply for at once?
Are these cards a good pick?
Is there anything I am missing?
Will I get the 20,000 bonus points with the Qantas Premier Platinum which you get if you have not earned points with a credit card before (I haven’t) if I apply for all cards at the same time then use that one first?
Unfortunately, we are not allowed to provide personal financial advice on this site. Specific credit card recommendation constitutes financial advice.
However, I’ll try and provide some general responses to your questions.
The 3 cards you have shortlisted have been popular cards to apply for. Depending on the current signup bonus, point earn rate, minimum spend, annual fee, etc., it may be considered a good card to apply for for your circumstances.
On the 20k extra points, sounds like you are eligible if you have not earn 1 Qantas pts from credit cards in the last 12 months. I would be careful about this as the Qantas pts are usually credited each (statement) month. So depending on what the minimum spend criteria is, (some do monthly spends) you may have to see whether you can time your spend on other cards to occur a month later.
Your travel plan sounds fine too BUT you need to understand that reward/award seats (the seats that cost a fixed amount of points and are usually much less than the costs for Points+Pay seats) are generally in limited supply - this is more so an issue on peak travel periods. So you might have 1 million points but doesn’t mean there are award seats to be redeemed → so you need to plan ahead or be flexible with timing and routes.
The good thing with your partner’s platinum status is they get earlier access to award seats so you could do a family point transfer to them to book the seats.
Hi @AxiosWorm welcome to the wonderful world of points hacking!
Take a look at Qantas website for ways that you might be able to maximise your points earning capacity - especially if you’re buying a car, and will need insurance etc…
I’ve used cards to pay the deposit on a car a couple of times - so that’s an option too if you chat with your dealer finance person. There are lots of ways to be creative around earning bonus points but another thing to keep in mind is the more cards you keep long term, the smaller the pool of potential cards you have to pick from to “churn” - and given each institutions blackout periods this will slow down your big bonus earn potential.
If you haven’t already, definitely check out some of the excellent articles on getting started with Qantas points on the site:
Thanks you both for taking the time to reply and for the links, I will check them out.
I haven’t booked on points before and have heard a few people say that reward seats are very hard to get. Is it even worth trying to travel on them? I have some flexibility but generally try and line it up with partner’s travel so don’t have ‘that’ much flexibility.
Despite the page being last updated in 2019, I’m sure the fundamental info and concepts are still relevant.
It is a lot of info to take in at the start of pointhacking but if you want to use points to fly at the pointy end for less or just offset your travel expenses, you would have to invest in learning about the process. If you don’t have the time and effort to do so, you could outsource some parts of the process to third party tools/businesses (some require some $).
