My father was my more adventurous parent. At 17, he rode his bicycle from Treviso to Turin to go and live with his eldest brother and look for work. In the eleven intervening years before he boarded a Fokker Friendship for a long haul flight to Australia, he worked as a coal miner in Switzerland and Belgium.
After getting to Australia, he never again either got on a plane or went further from home than Bacchus Marsh.
My mother, whilst not adventurous, did, on the northern edge of 19 years of age, get on a migrant ship at Messina and spend a month sailing to Australia. There were several burials at sea, and there were a few hours on terra firma at Fremantle, before she was reunited with her brother at Station Pier.
The only time she ever left Melbourne was many years later when I paid for her to have an Ansett Mystery Flight to Sydney – the only time she ever got on a plane.
This all goes much of the way to explain my own hard wired views on travel, which have taken me many years to overwrite. Namely, that travel is not a luxury but only undertaken as a necessity. If you need to travel to put bread on the table, or to get the opportunities to put a roof over your head, then you do it. But travel as a matter of recreation is something which was alien to my parents and their generation, even to the extent of making the difficult decision to never see the close kin they left behind again.
In my own case, I never left Melbourne or got on a plane before the age of 20, and never got a passport before the age of 32. Acquaintances at university who made sweeping comments like ‘you need travel for a full education’ had me looking askance at them in bemusement. And I was 47 before I rather apprehensively boarded a flight to Italy for the very first time.
I am now finally over my jet lag from my third and most recent trip to Italy, and mostly caught up with friends and reacquainted myself with Melbourne, the city I love most.
Which means it is time to deal with all sorts of minor issues, like mail which accumulated whilst I was gone, and to finalise my tax return.
And to decide what to do with the 14700 frequent flyer points I accumulated with Singapore Airlines from my trip.
Let me start by saying that I have little truck with frequent flyer programs. I used to be a rather keen collector of such points when Ansett existed. They paid for a trip to Perth for a holiday, and for two return flights to Melbourne when I spent most of 1999 working in Canberra.
But between May 1999 when I redeemed my last flight and September 2001 when Ansett collapsed in a heap, I accumulated 58,000 frequent flyer points in my personal account, almost entirely from the overzealous use of a Diners Club card (1.25 points per dollar spent). I had a very busy two years at work, where I was travelling extremely regularly as part of my job (hence a work account with 46,000 points which I could not touch), and had no time or inclination to take a holiday and redeem those points for free flights.
So when Ansett went under, those 58,000 points went down the gurgler! OUCH!
Since that time, I have lost the desire to accumulate any sort of loyalty points. I redeem my bank credit card points whenever I get $10 worth of value (as cash back on my account balance), and I regularly order Coles gift cards from Flybuys (I have noticed that Flybuys no longer offer wine deliveries as an option for points redemption).
I once, after I returned from my first trip to Italy, swapped some Flybuys points into Virgin Velocity points (along with whatever handful of points I had been able to get from Virgin’s partner, Etihad) in the vain hope of getting an interstate flight. Big mistake. My browser did not support redeeming points for flights from Virgin (although it did support redeeming as gift cards strangely enough), and the booking fees for the supposedly free flights were a huge turn off.
I took that as a timely reminder that frequent flyer programs are not worth the trouble, so I have successfully resisted the urge to chase points accumulation since then.
Indeed, when travelling to Italy in 2019, I did not even try to claim any Qantas points from my Emirates flight – assuming that this even is possible (Virgin were inconsistent about my Etihad flight and gave me partial points for reasons too obtuse for me to bother trying to understand).
This time, given that I am now more or less retired, I decided to register with Singapore Airlines’ frequent flyer program. After all, I might travel internationally more often than once every 3 or 4 years in future.
Which led me to accumulate 14700 points for my recent adventure.
This left me with a first world problem which needed solving – what to do with these points?
Those points are too few for an international flight, and I cannot redeem them, as far as I know, for a domestic flight.
Nor am I inclined to bank them in the event that I travel again in the near future, or to try and chase building a large points balance. The experience with Ansett and those 58,000 points has soured me on that idea.
So spending the points on something other than travel sounded like a jolly good idea. The problem is that merchandise ordered from the frequent flyer program shop cannot get delivered except to a Singapore address.
But I am not about to let that stop me. I want to use those points up now, rather than let them expire sometime in the next few years.
As it turns out, I do have a very old school friend who has lived in Singapore for the past decade. A bottle of 12 year old Jura Scotch is now making its way to his home and I wish him all the joy it will bring!
