There’s some excellent news for those who like to send their Woolworths Rewards to Qantas Frequent Flyer. Woolworths has just increased the value of its rewards program by around 13%, which is ironically in line with the recent Qantas devaluation.
In this post:
What’s changed?
From now on, 2,000 Woolworths Rewards points will be worth 1,000 Qantas Points. That’s an increase from the previous 2,000 Rewards points for 870 Qantas Frequent Flyer points.
How to maximise Woolworths Rewards?
The average person would usually complain that supermarket programs are a scam and you need to spend a lot of money to get a few points or some dollars back on your next spend.
This is true…unless you outsmart the Woolworths Rewards Programme.
The purpose of Woolworths Rewards is data collection and to drive the purchase behaviour of customers. How do they do that? By sending you targeted offers in an attempt to get you to spend more than you would normally.
From time to time Woolworths Rewards sends out bonus offers which you can activate. There’s usually a minimum spend requirement in a specific time frame to get X amount of bonus points. However, most of the time, these offers are tied to your spending behaviour.
Let’s say you’re a shopper who regularly spends $200 a week on groceries; this means the targeted offers Woolworths sends you will be an attempt to get you to increase the spend from that $200 baseline.
This isn’t ideal, so what can we do about it? How can you get offers with a lower spend amount and more points?
Strategy 1: Abstinence
You can simply shift your grocery shopping to Coles for a few weeks (or longer) until Woolworths realises they have lost a valuable shopper. Once the system recognises you haven’t spent any money with them for a while, they will start sending you offers trying to win you back. This is where you need to play it cool and see if the deals get better when you don’t take them up on it. Modern technology means they can track everything you do so, for example, opening an email with an offer and not activating it might be an indication that the offer was too low and most likely you will see an increase in the next email.
Strategy 2: Play the cards
Why have 1 Woolworths Rewards card when you can have multiple? Personally, I have around five different accounts so I can pick and chose the best offers. Woolworths doesn’t send the same offer to everyone, so by opening multiple accounts you can find the best possible bonus points offer and circle around the accounts to trigger even better bonuses when they think you’re not shopping with them. Just keep in mind you can only link 1 Qantas Frequent Flyer account so you the easiest way around this is by setting up accounts for family members which you can then use.
Supermarket Rewards Programs Conclusion
If you play by the rules, it’s usually tough to gain an advantage through supermarket rewards programs such as Flybuys or Woolworths Rewards. However, there’s no reason why you should play ball by giving these big companies precisely what they want: data. Knowing this, play the game on your terms and at least try to gain an advantage. There’s no exact science to all of this, but once you figure out the supermarket’s objective, you can connect the dots. Happy shopping!
