Points are a discount with extra steps

Holafly’s rewards page describes HolaCoins for discounts or future eSIMs, alongside Level Points for moving through Silver, Gold and Platinum. Airalo’s programme starts at 5% cashback in Airmoney and rises to 10% at Platinum. Those published features were reviewed on 31 October 2026; they’re useful benefits if the eligible purchases and redemption terms fit the way you travel.

I think a reward is easier to understand when you can explain its job without first explaining an exchange rate. That isn’t evidence that every customer dislikes points, and it doesn’t make a transparent cashback offer a bad one. It is a preference about what we want Passport Club to feel like.

Passport Club uses destination stamps and six ranks, from First Stamp to Passport Bro. Qualifying orders, eligible spend and the other published conditions are alternative routes through the ranks, rather than a checklist you have to complete in every column.

Landing Rescue is a complimentary emergency data pass for an eligible destination, up to 1GB with the exact plan shown before confirmation. Signal Boost gives up to A$15 off an eligible bigger fixed-data plan for a destination you’ve already bought for; it supplies a new eSIM, rather than changing the one on the phone. Choose-Your-Drop gives up to A$10 off an eligible travel eSIM order of at least A$25, with rules about which other offers you can use alongside it.

Two of those rewards still reduce a checkout. We haven’t replaced money off with something more mysterious; we’ve given the benefits a defined use and published the limits. All three use their own self-service route, without a manual approval step.

In our five-order worked example, Bali, Vietnam, Thailand, Vietnam again and Japan produce five qualifying orders, A$184 of eligible spend and four unique destinations. The second Vietnam visit doesn’t add another destination stamp, but it still contributes an order and spend.

Those five orders reach Data Diplomat through order count, without needing the separate A$300 spend threshold. Assuming none of the earned rewards has been used or reversed, the example leaves two Landing Rescue Passes, four Signal Boosts and one Choose-Your-Drop. That is a result you can follow from the rules, rather than a points total waiting for a conversion.

A cashback balance moves with each eligible purchase, while a rank can take longer to change. For someone who travels infrequently, the next threshold may be a distant prospect, which is why the first qualifying order already earns the Gate Mate reward. That helps, but it doesn’t make ranks automatically more rewarding than cashback.

Your rank looks at qualifying activity over the previous 365 days. As older orders fall outside that period, you may no longer meet the same rank’s requirements, but there’s a 30-day protection period before you move down. Rewards themselves don’t expire, although reversing the order that earned one can affect eligibility. The published thresholds and benefits can change too; our aim is to make the rules easy to follow, rather than promise the programme will never change.

If you like a straightforward cashback rate, that can be a perfectly good reason to value another offer. Our aim with Passport Club is to make the next useful benefit clear, without asking you to become unusually interested in the exchange rate of a travel-shop coin.