What you can actually buy with Qantas Points on Marketplace

Most people who collect Qantas Points know about flights and roughly nothing else. Fair enough — flights are where the value is, and it's where I'm sending nearly half a million points next year.

But there's a whole gift card section on Qantas Marketplace that almost nobody I talk to has opened, and it works in two completely different directions. One of them is a genuinely useful way to earn points on money you were already spending. The other quietly throws points away at about a third of what they're worth.

And the earn rates are not the same across all of them, which is the part that trips people up — including me, for a while.

Figures below checked 19 October 2026.

The range is wider than people expect

When I say “gift cards on Qantas Marketplace”, people picture a couple of department stores. It's broader than that. The categories currently run across supermarkets, department stores, fashion, technology, gaming, home, kids and teens, health and wellness, sports and fitness, restaurants, travel and entertainment, prepaid cards — and, oddly, prepaid eSIMs.

Brands you'll recognise in there include Apple, Airbnb, Uber, Uber Eats, Myer, David Jones, Harvey Norman, IKEA, Priceline, Xbox and Woolworths.

That's the bit that surprises people. It isn't a token selection. If you're buying something sizeable from a major Australian retailer, there's a reasonable chance there's a gift card for it.

Two directions, and one is a trap

This is the part that confuses everyone, because the same page does both.

You can pay with cash and earn points. Buy a $100 gift card, pay $100, collect Qantas Points on the way through. Then spend the card on something you were buying anyway. The points are the only thing that changed.

Or you can pay with points. Marketplace will sell you the same gift card for Qantas Points instead of dollars.

Don't do the second one.

A $25 Airbnb gift card was listed at 5,490 points when I checked. That works out at roughly 0.46 cents per point.

For comparison, the round-the-world award I'm saving for costs 152,200 points for a seat that would run well over two thousand dollars in cash — somewhere around 1.3 cents a point, and that's being conservative about it.

So redeeming points for gift cards gets you roughly a third of what the same points are worth on a flight. It isn't a scam, and if you have points you'll never use on travel it's better than letting them expire. But it shouldn't be anyone's plan.

The earn rates are not uniform

Here's the thing I got wrong for months: I assumed Marketplace paid one rate across the board. It doesn't. As at 19 October 2026 it runs at one, two or three points per dollar depending on the brand.

So a $200 Apple card earns 600 points. The same $200 on a Woolworths card earns 200. Same retailer, same website, same afternoon — three times the difference, purely because of which brand you clicked.

Check the rate on the product page before you buy. It's printed on every listing, and it moves.

Where the cut actually landed

You'll see a lot of people say Qantas “cut gift card earn rates to one point per dollar”. That's half right, and the half that's wrong matters.

The supermarket cards took the hit. Woolworths cards that used to earn three points per dollar now earn one. That's a two-thirds reduction on exactly the cards most people were buying, which is why it felt like everything had changed.

But Apple, Airbnb, Myer, IKEA, David Jones and Harvey Norman are all still sitting at three. If you wrote Marketplace off when the supermarket rate dropped, you wrote off the wrong thing.

The supermarket version beats all of it

Now the part my friend was annoyed about.

Woolworths and Coles both run a bonus points offer on gift cards every single week. Not occasionally. Weekly, Wednesday to Tuesday, all year, advertised in the catalogue and on in-store signage rather than in the app — which is why so many people never notice.

The standard offer is 20x Everyday Rewards points, which is 10 Qantas Points per dollar. What changes week to week is which brands are included.

Ten times better than Marketplace on a supermarket card, and more than three times better than its best rate. Same hundred dollars either way.

One warning. Visa and Mastercard gift cards are the only ones carrying a purchase fee — around $5.95 a card. At a 10x offer, a $100 Visa card earns 500 points and costs $5.95 in fees, which is about 1.19 cents a point. That's more than I value a point at. Skip anything with a purchase fee unless the multiplier is 20x or better.

When the supermarket offer doesn't cover your shop

Here's the gap, and it's the reason to keep both options open.

The supermarket offer only covers a handful of brands each week. This week it might be Ultimate cards. Next week Apple, or Uber, or cinema cards. If the thing you actually need to buy isn't on that week's list, the 20x does you no good at all.

That's when I check Marketplace. Not because it's better — it clearly isn't — but because three points per dollar beats nothing, and nothing is what you get buying the gift card at the shop with no offer running.

So the order I go in is:

1. Is the brand in this week's supermarket offer? If yes, buy it there. Ten points per dollar.
2. If not, is it on Marketplace? Check the rate on the listing. Three points per dollar on a big purchase is worth two minutes.
3. If it's on neither, just buy the thing normally and don't overthink it.

Worth saying plainly: none of this is worth doing for a $20 purchase. It's worth doing when you're about to spend a few hundred dollars at a retailer anyway — a new appliance, a big birthday, Christmas, a bulk shop.

The rules that keep this sensible

Never buy a gift card for a shop you weren't already spending at. That's the trap the whole hobby is built on, and points are not worth enough to justify it. Ten points per dollar is ten points. It is not a discount.

Don't put gift cards on a credit card you're not clearing. If you're carrying a balance at around 24 per cent, a hundred dollars sitting there costs you roughly two dollars a month. On a 20x offer the points still come out ahead. On a 10x Visa card with a fee, they don't.

Check the exclusions. These offers almost always exclude variable-load cards, and often one specific denomination. The limit is usually five cards per day per member. The fine print is where they get you.

And gift cards expire. Buying six of something you'll use over two years is fine. Buying six of something you might use is just prepaying a shop for nothing.

This is the same principle as everything else in my points ledger: the balance came from spending that was happening anyway, captured properly. Not from being clever — from not leaving points on the table.

Questions I get asked

Had you opened the gift card section before? I hadn't, for about two years.