Qantas Green tier: Earn air points for doing sustainable activities

Alan Joyce, Qantas chief executive, announcing the new Green tier in November.Credit: Getty Images

I was reading recently about The Jump, a new climate movement out of the UK which is encouraging people to make six meaningful lifestyle changes that studies show will make a strong impact on averting climate change.

The six changes include eating a mostly plant-based diet, buying a maximum of three new items of clothing per year and taking no more than one short haul flight every three years and one long-haul flight every eight years.

I think most Australians will look at the last item and think "I can't do that." We're separated from our families and the world by vast distances. Even domestically we are tremendously dependent on fossil fuels to get us anywhere.

The aviation industry is acutely aware that fuel burn is an existential threat but also that developing biofuels and other carbon-neutral measures are long processes which won't see results for many years.

Airbus and Fortescue Future Industries have just announced a partnership to fast track the development of carbon-neutral aircraft, aiming to fly hydrogen-fuelled commercial aircraft by 2035. That's great. Change can happen faster when there's a will, but there's a lot of commercial aviation that will happen between now and then.

We have to recognise that there's currently no such thing as sustainable flying. But it's important for consumers to support airlines that are committed to speeding up change, such as KLM, LATAM, Cathay Pacific, Alaskan, United, American and Delta, a few of the airlines which regularly make 'greenest' lists.

Last week, Qantas launched its Green Tier loyalty program, which is an innovative approach to the vexing question of how both travellers and airlines can mitigate against the inherent damage we do to the planet, not only by flying but with many of our lifestyle choices.

The program sits alongside the existing frequent flyer tiers of Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum and Platinum One, rewarding passengers with 10,000 points, 50 status credits or three tonnes of carbon offset when five proscribed sustainable activities are met in one year. This is in addition to the usual benefits gained through frequent flyer activity.

Chief executive of Qantas Loyalty, Olivia Wirth, says the program was inspired by an idea that came from frequent flyer members.

"The feedback is pretty clear," she says. "They want to travel but there's a definite cohort of our members who actually want to be educated and know how they can do it in a more environmentally friendly way."

The concept is novel because it doesn't just deal with carbon emissions from flights. Qantas was one of the first airlines to offer carbon offsets to passengers and has the highest uptake in the world, about one in 10 passengers choosing to offset their flights.

The Green Tier encourages frequent flyers to go beyond this by annually ticking off sustainable activities in six categories of their lives – staying with an eco-accredited hotel through Qantas hotels, making a sustainable purchase through the Qantas store, offsetting a flight, installing solar panels or offsetting home and car emissions through a verified carbon offset project, donating to a charity committed to sustainability, such as OzHarvest, and taking a sustainability quiz in the Qantas app.

Members can't cheat by doing five things in one category (say, staying at five eco hotels). The idea is to encourage thoughtfulness across all aspects of life. "We're looking at it holistically," Wirth says.

"Yes, flying is absolutely one component and there are different ways you can manage that, but there are lots of other parts of your life that we actually want to reward you for doing the right thing."

Currently the choices are limited to Qantas partners such as Qantas Wines and hotels and charities with which Qantas has an affiliation. Wirth says the program is evolving to include other partners and to be tweaked according to feedback from members.

"We know that points can help shift behaviour and we've seen that in different parts of our program," Wirth says.

"'And we also know that the way our program works with tiers, our members are really incentivised around reward and recognition and that's the underlying driver under the Green Tier."

What will be most interesting, once the stats are in, is how many members will choose to reward themselves with points or the much-coveted status credits, and how many will get totally with the program and select the carbon offset reward instead.

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