Vodafone targets travellers with Qantas Frequent Flyers deal and free NZ roaming
Loo Fun Chee
Less than a year after Optus cut ties with Qantas Frequent Flyers, Vodafone has stepped in to fill the gap as the telco works to built its customer base with a focus on travellers.
In a twin announcement this morning Vodafone said it would give subscribers the opportunity to earn up to 15,000 QFF points in a single hit when they signed a Vodafone contract.
Vodafone director of sales, Ben McIntosh, said rather than offer customers a “drip feed” of points, Vodafone will give customers their points up-front, on connection or with the roll-over of an existing contract.
Vodafone is also taking aim at outbound travellers, piloting free roaming to Australian customers travelling to New Zealand and dropping the previous $5 roaming offer for the country, making Vodafone Australia one of the first Vodafone operators in the world to adopt the flat $5 roaming fee.
I flew to NZ last week and got this Vodafone text on my personal phone when I landed. Great deal. Flipside, I have a work phone with Telstra and for 36 hours on the ground they slugged me $125 in data charges.
Well done Vodafone.
We joined Vodafone for the very point of travelling without bill shock. Recently returned from 17 days in NZ and only added $100 to our usual monthly bill, using our phones (3 of us on the data sharing plan) each day.
Bloody brilliant!
Also a long time FF with Qantas, will be interesting to see if we get allocated any airpoints as we are un-contracted (for travel purposes again).
Well done Vodafone, setting the benchmark of how mobile telco should work.
The development on roaming is painfully slow – their UK arm has offered free roaming to most Western destinations for years including on prepaid
http://www.three.co.uk/Discove.....el_At_Home
That $5 roaming is a con job – it’s barely usable. Tried it in Europe last year and all the countries I went to (bar the UK) limited the speed and constantly dropped the signal (even though when I switched to a local Vodafone SIM it was at full 4G speed with no dropouts).
It worked out better value to get a prepaid Three UK SIM and go around with that – they have unlimited data options and had no speed limitations or dropouts, even though it was using the same network.