Qantas + Oneworld = Big joke

As you may know, we flew from Canada to Australia and back this past winter. We flew with Qantas, codeshare with American Airlines. We chose to do this because Jennifer and I are both members of AAdvantage, the American Airlines frequent flyer program. It made sense because Qantas and American Airlines are both Members of One World, thus we would be collecting AAdvantage points for the whole flight which is useful here in North America, and in fact this one trip would give us the remaining points we needed to get an off peak flight to England to visit Jennifers family. We travel to Australia every year, and though I am not particularly fond of Qantas service we did plan to use the frequent flyer points as a reward for using Qantas so many times in the past.

Well, we took our trip and dutifully recorded our AAdvantage numbers on every flight. After we got back, I watched our accounts to make sure they credited the points, as last year we had to send in our boarding passes for the same trip to get the credit.

After the points were not credited for a while, I followed up with AAdvantage. I was informed by the agent that yes, they did have our flights all recorded in the system but no, there was no credit awarded by Qantas. When I asked why, they said that Qantas no longer gives points for tickets that are not full fare. I was shocked by this, since we had bought our tickets from a travel agent and they were issued by Qantas as in the past. We did not pay the highest rate for the tickets, but by no means were they cheap. Qantas definitely made money on us.

So next I emailed Qantas. There was a form return email that was no help whatsoever as it only referred me to an FAQ section on the Qantas site.

After this, I called Qantas. After a lot of automated help system negotiating, I finally got to speak with a real live person. This person informed me that yes, as of January they were no longer offering reward points on "discounted" fares. And no, there was no way to find this out prior to flying, not even on their website. There was a press statement in Australia, but of course that really did not make it's way to me over here across the pond.

OK, so I will continue to follow up with this so that we try to get some satisfaction. But in the meantime, I thought I would do an expose on the realities of saving $40 bucks over another carrier besides the fact that we did not get any frequent flyer points.

I researched the comfort level of six major carriers flying from Los Angeles to Sydney Australia. Albeit some of the routes are a little less direct, with some shopping and advance notice they do work out to almost the same price. but the difference is in seat pitch and seat width:

From best to worst in my opinion:

Air New Zealand - Boeing 747
Seat pitch: 34"
Width: 17.8"

American Airlines - Boeing 777
Seat Pitch: 32"
Width: 18.2"

Air Canada - Boeing 767ER (not direct flight)
Seat Pitch: 34"
Width 17.0"

United Airlines - Boeing 747 (economy plus)
Seat Pitch 36"
Width 17"
(Economy standard)
Seat Pitch 32"
Width 17"

Cathay Pacific - Boeing 747 (not direct flight)
Seat Pitch 32"
Width 17.5"

And Lastly, the airline that saved me $40 but denied me a boatload of frequent flyer miles

Qantas - Boeing 747
Seat Pitch 31"
Width 17.2"

I really doubt that I will ever fly with Qantas if given a choice again, and I will look for any other choice.

And we will be flying to Australia so many more times....

Sources: www.orbitz.com for routes & equipment types and www.seatguru.com for specs.