My current APD ballance is just over 10k. I have The good fortune that when I fly for work I often fly business, and am allowed to earn the SP and Air Points, and don’t spend them on personal travel as fast as I earn.

Just requalified for NZ*G on my own dime, mainly thanks to twice monthly trips PHX-SFO on UA, and two trips home to NZ.

Airpoints is still a better deal for me than MP, although they're hard to burn in the states. RU's + lounge access + SDC on United is better than I'd get with my flying patterns on United (probably barely *S)

Do IRD payments still qualify for APD? Can't find any mention of it being excluded, but keen for first hand confirmation before I spend the 1.42% convenience fee. Thanks.

There are really only 2 ways:

1) Be spending a lot of money on credit cards, especially for business. This is the absolute easiest way to clock up APDs are the majority of where mine come from.
2) Fly in premium cabins. If you fly in J to the USA, you get like, 300+ APD one way. Obviously that is just a little bit to offset the high fares, but if you travel a lot, it definitely adds up.

The most I think I've had in my account was 5,000 APD. But I drained that all on APD upgrades for me/my family very shortly after hitting it. When you travel a lot and take advantage of PE to J upgrades, your balance can go down pretty fast too!

Well I run my business and am self-funded, haha. Most of my travel is done for business. For business trips, I'll check ahead to see if I can get a guaranteed upgrade from PE to J with APDs. If I can, I'll take it - otherwise I'll fly J. But usually I can fly PE so each trip is around 100-150 APD one-way.

If it was just my own personal spending outside of my business, I'd probably get around ~140 APD from my card each month. I also take maybe 3 purely leisure trips a year long-haul and maybe 2 a year short-haul to Australia. For my leisure, I do everything I can to fly longhaul PE on sale and upgrade. When it's your own personal money, everything becomes infinitely more expensive, ROFL. So I'd probably get around 100 each way in PE, so that would be ~600 APD and then I fly seat-only fares to AUS so are practically nothing. So maybe I'd get around 700-800 APD for my leisure travel (with a bit of domestic travel thrown in there). So around 2,400-2,500APD a year... which is 4-5 APD PE-J upgrades which is nice.

And while credit cards will get you half way to *G, to get to Elite you need 900 SP to come from I believe Air NZ metal or very specific partner flights... so credit cards do a lot to get you to *G, but to get to Elite, you've got to be flying on NZ metal a lot no matter what.

Most of mine - generally around 1200+ come from just about everything going against either Kiwibank Mastercard @ $75 per point or Amex @ $59 per point. I get some from infrequent flying around NZ across to Oz as well. My wife is also self employed and while she doesn't fly in her role, we do put most expenses on CC first then balance / pay them back via her business account. I only do this where we generally don't get charged a convenience fee or admin fee etc by the vendor. Having seen that IRD payments can be made by CC I'm now wondering what I have missed re the maths of the situation ?

Keeping it to simple number - Just say every 2 months she pays $5000 GST - that's 66.6 airmiles earned by paying it off with the CC ( Kiwibank earn rate as they don't do Amex) . The convenience fee for doing so is $71. So you are basically buying air dollars at a slightly worse rate than if you did it via Air NZ at flight purchase time ? Over the 6 GST payments in a year she will have earned 400 air miles at a cost of $426.

What am i missing here? If they took AMEX at the same convenience fee it would fall slightly in our favour.

Thanks

It definitely comes out worse to pay IRD via a credit card and so that is one of the things that I pay direct deposit with.

For most expenses, even if there is a convenience fee though, I'll usually pay via cc and let the airpoints help subsidize it as I find it easier to just manage my money on a few sources rather than worry too much about what card I'm using - and I like the security of using a CC. But when it comes to the IRD, that isn't something you need to worry about.

People don't pay their IRD bill with a credit card to get APD. You'd have to be incredibly thick to do that.. It's all about the SP..

Gotcha. That makes more sense :) Didn't even think about status points as I rarely make silver - even with the 50% of points from CC. Just as I can see it coming over the horizon - somebody presses the reset button. Thanks for clarifying

I'm the same as you, 49 domestic, 8 TT flights last year and still only Silver (although, closer to Gold now than last year).

I only earn perhaps 1,200 APD p/a, flights and by using my AMEX Platinum card, too.

It's striking me by some of the comments that some people have either forgotten where they came from or are so out of touch when their leading sentence is: "it isn't hard when..." or "it's pretty easy when"... keep trying OP!

Westpac World MasterCard is 1 APD per $65 and 1 SP per $225 so it's $0.92 for 1 APD while 'earning' status points if my maths is correct :D

Haha that is true.

When people say that though, they don't mean that they aren't in a very fortunate position. I know I am extremely lucky. It's kind of like saying "finding someone to be able to understand you when traveling over isn't that hard if you speak English." Yes, someone who speaks Chinese only would find traveling overseas on their own around the world to be extremely difficult, and we are very fortunate that English is our main language and that it's the "universal language." If I said that, I would simply be providing context for why I'm able to travel so easy globally compared to non-English speakers - by acknowledging my very lucky life situation.

And so yes it "is pretty easy" to wrack up points if your work or business flies you overseas in premium cabins, or if your business has you spending lots on CCs - me saying that is acknowledging that I'm very lucky :)

Trust me: when I joined here I was not in a position to be flying like this. BP or even PE was completely out of the question so I looked at everyone complaining about BP's lack of prawns and was like "are you serious?"