Qantas don’t allow household accounts or pooling like Virgin and some other airline programs, but they do offer the ability to transfer points to another nominated family member. If you have at least 5,000 points in a family member’s account, they can be combined with another eligible family member’s account to stop them going to waste.

This is achieved through this page once logged into your frequent flyer account, and you can receive as many transfers from other people as you like. There’s more on this here on Qantas.com.

Note that you cannot transfer Status Credits to a family member— only points. Velocity, by comparison, allows family pooling of both points and Status Credits.

Family transfer restrictions are fairly straightforward, in that you can make unlimited transfers (this used to be only four) out of your Qantas account, with a minimum transfer of 5,000 points, and with a maximum amount of 600,000 points transferred ever 12 months. Full details here on Qantas.com.

It’s also only possible to transfer between eligible family members – defined here as:

Qantas may do spot checks on transfers and accounts to ensure you are actually transferring to an eligible family member.

How to use this to consolidate family accounts with low points balances

There is a useful way of consolidating accounts with a few thousand points in for later use, where you can do a chain of transfers to move balances of less than 5,000 points out of those accounts. You just need one account in the chain to start with that has 5,000 points or more already.

Example – assume Dad has 10,000 points in his account, Mum has 3,000, Son has 2,000, and Daughter has 1,000. The family has 16,000 points between them, but only Dad has enough to make the cheapest flight redemption of 8,000 points. By combining their points they could make two 8,000 point flight redemptions.

1. Dad would transfer 5,000 points to Mum, giving her 8,000, and leaving him 5,000.
2. Mum would transfer 8,000 points to Son, giving him 10,000.
3. Son would transfer 10,000 points to Daughter, giving her 11,000.
4. Daughter transfers 11,000 points back to Dad, giving him 16,000.

Each family member has made only one transfer, and each transfer is 5,000 points or more. Given this, Dad now has enough points to make two flight redemptions, and the 8,000 points previously in all the other accounts now have way more value than just being able to be redeemed for that in the Frequent Flyer store.

This isn’t too tricky to accomplish or understand, but I thought explaining it would be beneficial as one to store away for later use.

Note that transferring points between family members will not prevent your points from expiring—transferred points take on the expiry date of existing points in the account.

Now, go find some family members with low Qantas points balances who you can convince to hand over the keys to their accounts…