Amex drops Qantas as a transfer partner (seemingly without notice?)

As reported by Award Wallet, American Express Membership Rewards seems to have lost a transfer partner this morning. As of June 1, 2026, Qantas Frequent Flyer is no longer showing up in the list of transfer partners for Membership Rewards points in the United States. That’s a surprising development, given that I don’t recall having seen any prior notice of a change in transfer partners, and I can’t recall a time when Amex has dropped a transfer partner without warning.

We have heard quite a few reader reports recently of folks getting tripped up by phantom Japan Airlines award space showing up via Qantas Frequent Flyer (transferring points only to be unable to book the award they thought was available). One has to wonder if this is somehow related to customer complaints. That said, it feels hard to imagine that the small handfulls of customer complaints over transferring points to a pretty niche program would drive Amex to drop Qantas entirely. I’m not really sure what’s going on here.

While Qantas Frequent Flyer is a bit of a niche program in the sense that it doesn’t have quite as many clear sweet spots as some other programs, it was nonetheless useful in some cases for short-distance connecting OneWorld itineraries, for flying Israeli carrier El Al, and occasionally for flying some partners. Additionally, I believe that Qantas Frequent Flyer released additional award space on its own flights to its own members. Though award pricing wasn’t very competitive, I think it occasionally offered opportunities for award seats that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to book.

I’m just really surprised to see Amex drop Qantas without any prior notice or notification after the fact. That’s not typical of Amex. Rather, we usually get some notice before changes with Transfer Partners.

That leads me to wonder whether there’s a technical problem at play. However, in the past, when there have been technical problems with certain partners like Emirates, Amex has shown a notification on the transfer partner page about transfers being temporarily down. In this case, Qantas has been scrubbed entirely from the list of Transfer Partners, so I suppose this must be a permanent change. Hopefully, they don’t make a habit of removing partners without prior notice because it would be a real shame for a member to collect Membership Rewards points with a specific use case in mind, only to have the transfer partner they were targeting removed without prior notice.

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