Hello; I'm brand new to this. I feel like a kindergartner at an astrophysics lecture. I don't even know if this is the right place, but I'm pretty sure everyone here knows the answer to this: I have 400k or so Marriott points. I want to redeem them for a Quantas flight to Australia and NZ. Per the Marriott website, the "exchange rate" is 125,000 Marriott points to 35,000 Quantas miles. Now, according to the Quantas FF site, a multi stop roundtrip bus class ticket from LA to Australia and NZ requires 336,000 Quantas points. My problem is that I can't figure out how (or whether) the Quantas miles for which I can redeem my Marriott points equate to the Quantas points just quoted. Can anyone explain how this works? You may assume that I am indeed five years old.

Lewislaw

Being 5 years old , I will excuse the misspelling of Qantas

I will assume that your information regarding Marriott to Qantas conversion values are accurate

If you redeem 375k Marriott points, your Qantas FF account should be credited with 105k points

A simple award ticket from Los Angeles to Australia costs 96,000 points one way in business class

I would be thinking that transferring Marriott points to Qantas for an award flight may not be a good option

Can Marriott points be transferred to AA ? If so, then 125k AA points can be used to redeem a business class return flight between USA and Australia/NZ on Qantas ( plus you would avoid a few hundred dollars in fuel fines ) ; alternatively can they be transferred to UA or US since then can redeem on NZ/UA at a similar rate to AA

It looks like you can ( or could ) transfer to US; if you transfer marriott points to US, you would end up with 105k; you can purchase the remaining 20k required for an award ( and US has been having a decent number of promotions where you can purchase miles at half price ). This , I suggest, is going to be a lot better value than getting 105k Qantas points

More on the abbreviations
AA = American Airlines
US = US Airways
UA = United Airline (who fly to Sydney)
QF = Qantas (without the u)
BA = British Airways

You can use AA & BA miles on QF to get a reward flight if you can find one
You can use US miles on UA to get a reward flight if you can find one

And NZ too I would have thought

Marriott cannot be converted to AA, so that is out. The best conversion rate is to AS and BA, both of which can be used to redeem on QF. Other choices are DL (pretty good J LAX-SYD) and HA (flies older J HNL-SYD but might suit if wanting to combine with a vacation in Hawaii). For completeness can also convert to LAN (and lots of other airlines). Availability severely dictates your choices if not having tremendous date flexibility. AS is probably the best redemption but choices are complicated except converting to QFF is a bad idea.

Converting to BA is something I would avoid since BA's idea of redemptions is charging a LARGE amount of money in fuel surcharges

According to http://www.marriott.com.au/rewards/usepoints/morerew.mi

125,000 Marriott Miles will net 50,000 US Airways or Alaska Miles
30,000 Marriott Miles will net 10,000 US Airways or Alaska Miles

Given 110k US miles needed for business class r/t to AU/NZ, a total of 280k marriott miles needed for a business return on Star Alliance
The same applies using Alaska Miles for business r/t on Qantas

Assuming that AS doesn't charge fuel surcharges, I would use one of these plans depending on which airline can be found for availability to redeem on

The transfer rate to United Airlines is the same as that to US Airways, however the redemption cost on United is 135k rather than the 110k that US Airways charges, so would use US rather than UA

Delta could be an option if neither Qantas nor Star have availability, but the redemption cost is higher again at a minimum of 150k Delta Miles for a r/t business class ticket ( which is more than a 1st class award using AS or US miles )

Wow; this is a real eye opener. I would never have thought (or even imagined) that one could do successive "swaps" from one carrier's frequent flier program to another. You guys are amazing! Thanks for the major eye opener. And for answering my basic question, which is that (essentially) Qantas miles are the same as Qantas points.

The Qantas term is points. For British Airways [BA] the term avois. For most airline freq flyer programs the term is miles.

Getting a business award flight on Qantas can be very hard, no matter which airline freq flyer program miles/points/avios you are using

QF FF program is a black hole for points. Once you put them in, you cannot move POINTS back out again. You can only trade out with commodities - such as an air ticket, set of steak knives or a hotel bed.

You cannot move them between the FF programmes ; in the examples given, it is a case of using miles from programme A to redeem on airline B

e.g. Use Alaska Airways miles to book a ticket on Qantas or use US Airways miles to book a ticket on United