Qantas Frequent Flyers expands to car, home insurance

Qantas has plans to extend its growing Frequent Flyer universe into your garage.

Qantas’s mammoth frequent flyer program is gunning for a share of the $10bn car insurance industry in an effort to increase earnings to $600m a year by 2022.

With a red Holden Commodore behind them, Qantas Group chief executive Alan Joyce and Loyalty boss Olivia Wirth launched Qantas car insurance at the airline’s Mascot headquarters on Tuesday.

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Underwritten by Auto & General, the insurance premiums come with a wad of frequent flyer points for signing on, and more to be earned through car servicing and other safety checks.

Mr Joyce said Qantas already offered travel, health and life insurance products, and he expected its car insurance would prove just as successful.

“The motor insurance business in Australia is worth $10bn and it’s getting bigger every year as more and more cars come onto the road,” Mr Joyce said.

“It’s a great business opportunity for us and we believe thousands and even millions of our customers will be interested in this to earn frequent flyer points from us.”

He said the power of points was now so great, the offer of frequent flyers could change purchasing habits.

“It’s become so much part of the economy, so much part of the country, that people talk about it continuously, and we know the reason why it’s so powerful is because Qantas points change people’s behaviour,” said Mr Joyce.

“It allows people to move to different products.”

Qantas Group CEO Alan Joyce and Loyalty CEO Olivia Wirth. Picture: AAP

Already the second most profitable part of the Qantas Group after the domestic airline, the loyalty business was expected to grow its earnings from $374m to between $500m and $600m by 2022, he said.

“We’re targeting 7 to 10 per cent growth every year so we’re going to be launching more and more products. The ones we have launched have been really profitable since day one,” Mr Joyce said.

The announcement coincided with a determination by the International Air Services Commisison, awarding Qantas and Virgin Australia one slot each at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport from March 29 next year.

Qantas had sought both slots on offer for flights from Sydney and Melbourne to Haneda, but the IASC granted one for Virgin to launch the first Brisbane-Haneda service.

Mr Joyce said they were happy with the outcome but did question whether the Virgin Australia service would last.

“We just hope that the slots that have been awarded will continue and Australia doesn’t lose them eventually,” he said.

A Virgin Australia spokeswoman said it was “about time someone brought competition to the monopoly market between Brisbane and Tokyo”.

“We couldn’t think of a better airline to do just that,” she said.