As far as I can tell, unless you're regularly flying business class, it's a waste of time. If I put all my family expenses through my card, I get a one way ticket for one member of my family after a year.
Have I missed something? I reckon it would just be better if all the money wasted on running the computer systems and advertising for the rewards systems was just taken off the original ticket price.
I dunno. I fly a bit through work. Have the dual platinum credit card with amex for extra points. I seem to get a fair few. Nuff to fly the family somewhere every couple of years. For a start u should get 20-40k points per year just with living expenses. Helps if u have a premium card
Qantas makes more money from their Frequent Flyer program / business unit than they do from anything else.
Although I think the reporting is distorted by the fact they make an assumption as to how many issued FF points issued will be redeemed in the future - so future liabilities are assumed to be less than actual liabilities issued and so financial reporting is loaded to this year at next years potential expense.
But still - the FF program makes more profit than flying aeroplanes or investing in other airlines.
I agree Harrow. 99% of my purchases are on that system but even after several years, still not enough to do didley squat. It's yet another way that they're smarter than us.
Bastards!
When we built our house we paid via amex or visa for a lot (50k+), when we got married and planned our honeymoon (60k) we paid by card for everything (just transfered the cash afterwards) and now we pay all our bills with it and over the last 5 year's we've used it for a bunch of overseas trips and a 4 or 5 stays at WA hotels. Not too bad i dont think.
I think if you have significant purchases or fly often its definitely worth taking advantage of.
We use Amex Platinum which gives us one free domestic return Virgin flight per year. In January the four of us flew from Perth to Hobart for a holiday and paid $0 dollars for the flights other than a small amount of fees - can't remember how much but it was bugger all.
The "secret" is to not book the tickets using Amex but to convert the points to Virgins Velocity FF points which gives you more flight km's per point than Amex. It took us about a 2 years to get enough points to get the 3 extra tickets plus the free annual one. An Amex Platinum card has quite a hefty annual fee attached but we are fortunate that we only pay $80 per year because we still have the old green Amex that the wife had when she was working full time so they don't charge for the Platinum card 
You just have to be aware of the best way to use your points and you can get some reasonable value without going overboard by trying to put everything on the card.
I hear Virgin is a lot better, but I'm stuck with Qantas because of my work.
I also refuse to use an Amex card because I don't like their aggressive marketing or the high fees the retailer gets stuck with. In the end it only pushes up prices.
I fly regularly from Brisbane to Sydney at least once a week for work and just fly the cheapest seats with Virgin and accumulate my points for seat upgrade when me and she who must be obeyed take our holidays. I just use the points and perks from my status level to upgrade my seats rather than purchase a seat. I find there is more value in the points to upgrade than purchase. But I don't use my money on the fly buys.
Oh I don't even bother with the fly buys. Total shxt. But point per dollar on credit card not to bad.
I took my family of 4 around the world (Europe including several flights around Europe and New York) last year for 560,000 and about $4000 in taxes. The point saved me at least $10k if flights were payed for. Took me a few years to get the points up using mostly Credit car rewards. Then this year my wife and I went to Italy in June/July for 240,000 points plus about $1200 in taxes. The cheapest alternative flight I could find was for both of us was about $5k, so the points saved us about $4k.
I just signed up for a new Amex card for myself with 100,000 points, and then referred my wife so I get a 30,000 point referral fee plus she gets another 100,000 points. That is 230,000 for about $900 in card fees. Almost enough to go back to europe next winter!!
