Qantas overhauled its Frequent Flyer program yesterday with these major changes:

1. You’ll need to earn more status credits to keep Silver, Gold or Platinum
2. You can earn up to 140 status credits on the ground, primarily by making purchases with partners
3. You can roll over some status credits when you reach more than the number required for your tier
4. Points Club and Green Tier are gone

Minor changes include an additional lounge pass for Silver members, a new reward seat finding tool, and a lifetime ‘milestone’ system.¹

The first item is what matters most for members, and as Qantas announced, it’s about to become harder to retain most tiers. Here’s the table the airline provided to the media (headings and percentages mine):

Published Tiers

Tier	Current credits to retain	New credits to retain	Percentage change
Silver	250	300	20%
Gold	600	700	17%
Platinum	1,200	1,400	17%

(The credits needed to upgrade to each of these tiers will stay the same, which is why Qantas is framing all of these changes as a “single target” for each tier.)

But those tables don’t quite tell the full story. In a section about status credit rollover, Qantas also said that benefit would replace the loyalty bonuses that are offered to “some” members.²

The existing loyalty bonus gives members 50 status credits for every 500 they earn, as long as they’re earned on Qantas or Jetstar. Reach 500 credits on those airlines, for example, and your total becomes 550. As long as you’re regularly flying on those airlines, it lowers the effective number of credits required at each tier.³

Apply that to the credits table, and the three major tiers get even harder to keep:

Effective Tiers

Tier	Current effective credits to retain	New credits to retain	Percentage change
Silver	250	300	20%
Gold	550	700	27%
Platinum	1,100	1,400	27%

Ouch.

Qantas wants to split its customers into two camps: those who are more loyal than their tiers need them to be, and those who do just enough to get into each tier. The former group gets rewarded, the latter gets punished. That’s their decision to make, but let’s be clear: this is a steeper hill to climb for what I’d bet are many members who want to keep Gold or Platinum.

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1. The lifetime milestones give members a year of Platinum for every 10,000 credits they earn above Lifetime Gold. The idea must be to incentivize lifetime flyers to keep pursuing credits, since the 75,000 credit threshold is so absurd that members are giving up the chase. It’s a shame these milestones are no less absurd. ↩︎
2. I think “some” is an understatement when it comes to the members for whom this matters. I read “some” as “not many,” and I doubt there are “not many” Qantas Gold or Platinum customers who receive these bonuses. ↩︎
3. Without the loyalty bonus, there’s also less of an incentive to fly Qantas or Jetstar metal. That means more flexibility to fly with other oneworld airlines or take a codeshare flight. ↩︎