Some hopeful signs from Qantas

As I've mentioned before, Australia is planning on reopening its borders for Australian citizens/permanent residents to come and go. Even though we're really excited to be reunited with our Timbo, we've been very cautious about believing much of what we hear from the authorities down under. Even this very reopening announcement from the NSW Premier required a contradiction from the Prime Minister.

I got an email from Qantas today that gives me some concrete reasons to believe that at least the first part of the border opening will happen – service from Sydney to London and Los Angeles will begin within a week. (Our boy Tim has a ticket the US in December, so we can spend the holidays together). 

The second half of the reopening – allowing foreign tourists to enter Australia – will be greatly affected by these new flights' ability to draw down the number of "stranded" Australians abroad. The Prime Minister felt they needed to get these folks home before allowing foreigners to compete for seats on these flights.

Paxex has a great story about how so many Australians are itching to leave that literally billions of Qantas points have been redeemed since the announcement. In fact, there was a single day where half a billion points were redeemed! (Queue the joke here about how Qantas points are so devalued that this was actually only enough points for like a dozen flights 😜). There's also concrete plans to bring their massive A380s back into service much earlier than previously planned.

good news from Qantas in my inbox