antennae

I just flew CMB-KUL and then KUL-SYD on Malaysian in Business (Z), MH141. The first flight credited fine (80 SCs) but the much longer second flight has credited as Flexible Economy (only 30 SCs).

Oddly the Qantas points calculator doesn't seem to list Business for this particular flight.

Does anyone know what the correct SC total I should have received for this flight is?

Dave Noble

It is correct . As per https://www.qantas.com/fflyer/dyn/fl...ine-earning#mh

Flights between Australia and Malaysia in business class ( or 1st class should MH introduce it to Australia ) ( ACDFIJZ ) earn as Flexible Economy

Flights booked in C, D, I , J and Z class will earn at Flexible Economy Frequent Flyer Earn Category, however will receive Malaysia Airlines Business Class service, and flights booked in A and F class will earn at Flexible Economy Frequent Flyer Earn Category, however will receive Malaysia Airlines First Class service

Flexible Economy from KUL-SYD earns 4000 points plus 30 SCs
Business from CMB-KUL earns 2,500 points and 80SCs

So total earning is 6500 points and 110 SCs

There is no status bonuses for travel on MH, so points earning will be 6500 points regardless of whether bronze, silver, gold, platinum or platinum one status is held

mattm199

Dave Noble

or just to credit to a better earning scheme

eminere

It's amazing how people have the time to find this forum and write up a post but not run a basic search on a question that has been asked and answered dozens of times before.

serfty

At least they asked the question here rather than putting up with what is generally a completely inadequate Qantas customer "Care" regime.

Some come and ask, but are never sen again; some stay and enrich the forum. We were all newbies once.

The crediting has been at least explained.

moa999

All Simpler Fairer.

perthite

Ahh, but you do get Malaysian Business Class service

Flights booked in C, D, I , J and Z class will earn at Flexible Economy Frequent Flyer Earn Category, however will receive Malaysia Airlines Business Class service, and flights booked in A and F class will earn at Flexible Economy Frequent Flyer Earn Category, however will receive Malaysia Airlines First Class service.

Platy

IMHO it's also amazing how often a newbie is "welcomed" to FT with a variety of less than encouraging responses, some highly experienced and well informed regulars find time to criticise a newbie rather than either answer the query or simply move onto the next thread if they are disinclined.

Not everyone's data mining skills are crash hot, they might not be across the basics (of fare classes), might have "innocent" expectations about how an airline like QF treats its FF'ers.

IME most folk have very low levels of knowledge on FFer matters. I am also sometimes surprised to watch some other folk, for example, in the scenario of seeking to validate facts in a "bar discussion" (even with high levels of education and a great job) struggle to "Google" information on demand.

Incidentally, data mining isn't always easy when you don't know what it is you don't know!

In this specific case the QF calculator has not been programmed to return data on the search criteria of KUL-SYD in MH in business. Some twit at QF has loaded the program without that capability! So the OP has followed the usual process of checking on the QF website, locating and applying the earning calculator, which would work in the majority of cases.

Looks to me like QF should get the criticism here, not the OP.

poopbunny

I wish there was MH service and MH business class meals on some of my QF J flights.

Dave Noble

The person who set up the program seems to have followed the process well if you accept that the program is returning based on the Qantas Frequent Flyer Earn Category

The https://www.qantas.com/fflyer/dyn/fl...irline-earning page details what booking classes earn to what Qantas Frequent Flyer Earn Categories
The points calculators detail the earnings per category ( as well as the page providivg a link to page where booking class to earn category ia detailed )

Doesn't seem like the person was a "twit"

The question posed by the OP seemed pretty resonable and got details to explain that the earnings were correct in 1st couple of posts - I agree that there seems no reason to berate the OP for the question

Platy

I understand and appreciate your logic, Dave, but it ain't a customer friendly way of doing business!

The person is a twit if you accept that the goal of the calculator is to present the information to the customer.

There is no reason why the calculator can't be programmed to show the correct points and status credits when the customer enters their specifics. QF has simply not bothered to do this.

QF's approach leads the customer unnecessarily into a multi-step process (in certain specific cases, which somehow the customer has to recognise when the calculator fails them).

If properly programmed, the calculator could remove the need for the customer to understand the fare classes, look up tables on the QF website, try to locate the actual fare class on their booking, etc. Actually be a great tool! And arguably a necessary one to give the customer havlf chance to calculate their earn, ever since the "enhancements" to savage the earn point and status credit rates on certain airlines / routes, etc., and a U-turn on tiered distance based earn rates.

Perhaps the difference between the QF programmer's view point clashing with the reality of bad design in terms of practical outcomes. Customer confusion arises (as evidenced by the OP's experience).

You can compare the earn rate on BA versus QF say between SIN and SYD, but get stuffed over the MH flight.

Dave Noble

It *does* show the correct points - select earning category "Flexible Economy" and it shows the earning for Flexible Economy - the linked table provides the correlation of booking class to Earning category

I doubt very much that the programmer defined the specifications for how Qantas wanted it to work - Not liking the implementation does not mean that the person who implemented is at fault or stupid in any way - no reason at all to suggest that the person was a twit

The implementation is logical - whether another method could have been better is debatable - people could be equally confused and assume faults if it did show business class in the drop down and then quote economy rates

Platy

I do appreciate your points, Dave.

The real issue is that QF wants to manipulates the FF point and status earn on partner airlines.

Such is the case for MH business and first, for certain sectors, wherein QF wants to slice earn rates.

The other issue, is the potential confusion of the customer, when we have four definition sets with very similar naming:

1. Travel class (economy, premium economy, business, first)
2. Product fare class as presented to the customer (sale, saver, flex, etc)
2. Fare class codes (A,J,etc)
3. Frequent flyer earn categories

No wonder customers get confused and the IT folk struggle to program a simple earning calculator!

That said, since the MH business / first example is an irregularity, it could be easily identified as such when using the actual calculator.

Dave Noble

I am not suggesting that the information provided is the best that Qantas could manage

What I am saying is that those developing software generally work to a specification ; if the specification leads to something that isn't best for the users which the customer is writing it for it is not the fault of the person implementing the code but the responsibility of the people who came up with the design and those that did acceptance testing

It is most unreasonable to call the person who wrote the code a "twit" if he produced that which the custoner requested

The MH situation is , as you say, an oddity - allocating CDIZAF to Flexible economy could be a much simpler way to implement the handling of such an outlier than to have special coding inside the programme to handle special case MH flights - one requires recoding , the other just a modification of a mapping table

When being written, there may not have been expectation by designers that business class would be treated as economy for earnings on an airline