TRAVEL|GLOBETROTTERS
I Never Pay Full Fare for Flights
How?
Pene Hodge prompted me to write how I fly overseas so frequently on a tight budget.
The Qantas Frequent Flyer Program
Here is why I don’t pay for overseas airfares — well, actually I pay the tax, not the flight. I joined Qantas Frequent Flyers in 1994 even though I was anything but a frequent flyer. I still had 3 kids under 12 so I wasn’t going far.
In 1996, I saw a travel special to Disneyland advertised in the newspaper. It seemed too good to be true so I rang to find the catch. There was none! And there was a bonus of 30,000 points on each fare — even on the kids’ fares. That was a return flight from Brisbane to Perth for the whole family. So we went to Disneyland and San Francisco and a few months later flew to Perth. We hired a motorhome — the kids thought they’d died and gone to heaven.
Back in the nineties, airport taxes were either minimal or non-existent. I continued to collect frequent flyer points (I think other airlines might call them air miles) by shopping using my credit cards. It’s amazing how quickly the points add up.
Airport Taxes
When I flew to London Heathrow in 2011 for “the trip of a lifetime”, the economy flight…
