Qantas to reduce Frequent Flyer earn when travelling on American Airlines

Qantas have just announced some changes to its venture with American Airlines

• Qantas will no longer codeshare on American Airlines’ services between Sydney and Los Angeles, for new bookings made for travel from 1 February 2017.

• Qantas will adjust its Qantas Frequent Flyer policy with American Airlines to bring it in line with other oneworld carriers from 1 May 2017.

The latter is reported to be around decreasing status credit earn when flying on AA.

I saw that the reason for this is because Qantas wants to convince the US Department of Transportation to allow a joint venture between themselves AA.

I wonder which routes will see reduced SC earn (I guess SYD/LAX would be a prime example) because some other routes operated by multiple OW carriers already have the same earn rate (e.g. JFK/LHR at 100 for J on both AA and BA). Unless they're doing what they did with carriers like MH and re-classifying J as Y for earn rates etc.

Don't AA coded flights already have the same reduced SC earn of other oneworld flights? AA just has the extra status bonus point earn.

The QF release suggests that only AA codes on QF11/12 and QF codes on AA72/73 are being dropped, while codesharing domestically on each end and on QF3/4/7/8/15/16/73/74/93/94/95/96 and AA82/83 remain.

Will we start seeing AA reduce Business class fares for SYD/LAX to levels charged by United i.e. $5,000 odd fares?

So, to prove to the US DOT that a proposed JV alliance with AA will benefit customers, QF wind back existing benefits. Gee, the logic is astounding - and just a little bit 'smoke and mirrors' IMHO.

You know, with QF's continual propensity to fiddle with QFF earn rates and status credits ... the program is rapidly losing any gloss that it once might have held.