Ten internet points if you can guess
where I am today mmm. Regular viewers of this channel will know... that's not going
to help. This is better. Regular viewers of this
channel will know that I travel to and from between Melbourne and Sydney quite
a lot for work and when you travel quite a lot with one airline after a while if
you're a member of their frequent flyer scheme you'll start to go up in their
frequent flyer status tiers. Now I've talked about status credits before on
this channel I'll link to the video before if you haven't seen that one
there's a very important warning actually on status credits which I
covered in a previous video so make sure you watch that one first. But because I
have been travelling with Qantas and their partner airlines through One World
quite a lot over the last 18 months a couple of weeks ago this happened.
Lola! What are you doing there? Okay off to Sydney.
So let's start quickly how do you get to that Platinum level with Qantas? Well
if you're not retaining platinum so if you're a different tier and you're trying
to move your way up to get to platinum you need to earn one thousand four
hundred status credits in that previous year. Let's let's do some quick maths. If
your'e flying between Sydney and Melbourne like we're going to do today you earn 10
status credits for that trip between Sydney and Melbourne. As we said to get
to Platinum you need 1400 status credits. So if you want to earn Platinum level
just by doing simple basic economy domestic flights you've got to fly
between Sydney and Melbourne 140 times in the year!. Now obviously that's not
achievable but I'm gonna give you some tips a bit later on this video on how
you can more easily earn status credits when to fly and who to fly wit. But I'll
get into that a bit later in this video. In the meantime in order for me to show
you the benefits we actually need to be at the airport so let's go to the airport.
I need to get out the way.Look who I found in Sydney!
Sorry I'm in your shot. So now we're at the airport the other
advantages you get then io being Platinum start here when you're at the
airport. For example with your baggage as a Platinum frequent flyer you get to
take 50 kilograms of baggage on your flight as opposed to the 30 kilograms
that you would be able to take if you are a bronze frequent flyer or if you
weren't a member of the frequent flyer scheme at all. You also get something
called priority baggage which means that whichever class of flight you're flying
on your bags will still get checked through as a business or first-class
passenger which means that they should come out the other end quicker than
everyone else's which I can't actually test today because we don't have any
bags we don't have any bags with us here in Sydney. Then of course the other
benefit when you're at the airport is if you're a Gold frequent flyer with Qantas
you get access to the Qantas Club lounges you don't need to pay for
separate membership for those it's normally around six seven hundred
dollars a year otherwise. But if you're a Platinum frequent flyer you actually
get to go into the business class or first class lounges depending on what
they have at the airport.
Then of course the final advantage is you can go through the special express
keys that they have for security so you don't need to queue up in the long lines.
There's a dedicated line for platinum and Gold frequent flyers? Yep.
So Gold and above you can go through the express queues into security which is
what we're gonna do now.
It's really nice. I think it's very big and a lot more spacious much bigger than
Melbourne, the business lounge. The view not as good as Melbourne because Melbourne's got a really
nice view on that corner over, you can see into international. But really nice
and big, very modern design if you want to work if you want a quiet area you want
a view you want by the TV. Got a nice selection of food drinks similar to the
Qantas club but just more private, bit quieter.
Now we're on an a330 on the way back but on planes like the 737 when you flying
Platinum or as a Gold frequent flyer you can actually get a preference of where
you sit and it opens up a lot more inventory on the plane for you. So on the
737 for example when you're Gold or above you can often choose to sit in the front
of the plane. So then you have something called priority upgrades if
you do put in an upgrade request like a points request to upgrade from say
economy to business what they'll do is they'll look at the status of frequent
flyer and work their way from the top down. So there's only a limited number of
upgrade seats available the higher your tier of status the more
likely you are to get that upgrade anyway.
Always reading! So how do you get those status credits and what are some of
those tips? Well of course as we saw before you're not going to do 150 140
flights between Melbourne and Sydney. There are a few key things that I look
out for here right so the first one is and this happens pretty much about once
every year so you've really got to look out for it and that's when Qantas do
their double status credits offering. You tend to get about four or five days to
book flights for the double status credits offering but you can book the
flights anything up to about a year in advance. So if you know you're going to
be doing some traveling and if you see a double status credits often come out
that really is the best time that you can book. Then if you need like a quick
hit a quick injection of status credits sometimes what I do is what we call a
status credits run which is looking for a sale fare which you know is going to
get you good status credits and just almost fly for the sake of it. Good one
here in Australia if you get a flexible economy fare between the East Coast and
West Coast so say Melbourne to Perth or Brisbane to Perth you can get 30 status
credits each way for an economy fare and if there's a sale fare on all the time
so you're not actually paying that much cash for it return you can get 60 status
credits just for that one flight.
And then the other thing is partner airlines. So even though right now we're
flying on Qantas and earning status credits and frequent flyer miles with
Qantas, the other trick you can use is look at the partner Airlines in the
Alliance. So One World alliance for Qantas for example you can still earn status
credits they come back into our case into your Qantas frequent flyer account.
Now the same principle goes here you want to look for sale fares wherever you
can so go on your sites like Skyscanner, Kayak, Last Minut,e and also the actual
airline sites themselves. Sign up for their newsletters and get their alerts
for when they've got sale fares coming out. And if you combine all of that and try
and fly with those partner Airlines it's actually a really good way to earn
status credits quite quickly and you get to experience other carriers at the same time.
So is it worth all the time the effort the cost that you have to go through in
order to get that platinum status? One thing I should say is today I have been
focusing on domestic travel as a Platinum frequent flyer of course with
international travel I think the benefits are probably a lot larger
because not only are you traveling longer distances so you're gonna get more
frequent flyer miles but also you're gonna get access to those international
first and business class lounges in the international terminals which are
obviously gonna be a lot different than the ones you get in domestic. I should also
mention that this video is really it's not aimed at everybody but it's really
for you guys out there, and if you made it this long you kind of know who you
are you're, in that kind of middle tier of frequent fliers and you're wondering
what it's like to get up to that kind of top or second top level. Is it worth doing it?
I only think it's worth spending the time and money to get up to
a tier like Platinum if you're gonna fly a lot in the year after you attained
that status, and what I mean is there's no point getting to that tier getting
the bag tags getting the nice card and then not doing any flying because
you're really not gonna maximize all the time and money and effort you put into
getting to that tier in the first place. The reason why I do it is because just
travel's my thing. I love to go to airports, I love to see new places I really
enjoy looking around the lounges and getting all that kind of access to areas
that I might not otherwise have done. So for me I invest my time and money into
travel because that's what I like to do. Now with the international side of
travel that I mentioned I've actually got a couple of trips coming up in the
next few months which of course I'm gonna bring you guys along on as well
and we'll take a good look at some of those international business and first
class lounges that I'll film here on the channel and also I'll put a link below
to my website where I blog about them as well and give you a lot more photos and
a bit more of an in-depth look at what goes on in those lounges. But if your
objectives are different if you're looking at buying a house having kids
you've got big investments coming up, whatever it is unless you know that
you're gonna be traveling a lot after you attain that status I would
question whether it's actually worth the time and effort you need to put in to
get to that in the first place. I personally think for the lounge access
the extra baggage the priority upgrades double the frequent flyer points that
you would get otherwise, for me because I travel a lot yeah it's absolutely worth
it. But for you guys you just need to make a decision based on your own
situation. All right I'm gonna leave it there, stick around
because coming up later this week on the channel aborted takeoff in the
Cirrus SR22. I had a bit of an interesting situation last time I flew
down to Tooradin, if you haven't seen that video yet I'll link it up here.
I didn't actually put in that video an incident that happened to me on take off
leaving Moorabbin first time around but more on that on the channel coming up later this week.