How your grocery shopping can earn you a return ticket to London

Here's a secret that only dedicated frequent flyers know: supermarket loyalty schemes discourage loyalty to supermarkets, and you can exploit their weaknesses to accumulate enough frequent flyer points for a trip to Europe in just a year - provided you know how to play the game.

There are two big loyalty schemes in Australia: Woolworths' Everyday Rewards and Coles' Flybuys. For every dollar you spend at either supermarket, you earn one reward point. These points can be converted into either Qantas Frequent Flyer points (Woolworths) or Virgin Velocity points (Coles) at a rate of two for one.

The average weekly grocery bill for an Australian household of four is $203, with an additional $32 a week on alcohol. If you spend $235 a week on food and booze, that's a total of $12,220 a year. If you ran up your entire bill at Woolworths (and its associated bottle-shop chain, BWS) then converted your Everyday Rewards points to Qantas Frequent Flyer (QFF) points, you would have only 6110 Frequent Flyer points.

Since a one-way Classic Reward flight between Sydney and Melbourne "costs" 6200 points with Virgin or 6400 points with Qantas (plus fees and taxes in each case), you could expect to pay for that flight in about 13 months.

So, why bother, right?

Exactly.

But if you follow my advice, you can earn at least one return airfare all the way to London and back in 12 months, just by shopping regularly at Woolworths and Coles.

But the keyword here is "and".

Set up three accounts per loyalty scheme - one for yourself, one for your partner and one for a dependent child, as families can pool their Virgin points and transfer Qantas points between members.

Link your Coles accounts to Velocity and your Woolworths accounts to Qantas. Velocity is free to join, and QFF is free when you join through Everyday Rewards.

Download the Everyday Rewards app and the Flybuys app to each member's mobile phone.

The apps will offer bonus points to spend a certain amount of money. At first, it might be that you can earn five times the number of base points per dollar if you spend more than $50.

Start shopping, but do not activate the first offers.

The longer you resist, the more attractive the offer will grow: five times points will become 10 times points, then 20 times points, then 30 times points.

Take 30-times points.

If you can earn 30-times points on every dollar you spend, you can build up your stash 30 times faster! You could, theoretically, earn one return ticket between Sydney and Melbourne every month - or have change left over from a single ticket between Adelaide and Brisbane (9600 points on Qantas; 11,800 on Virgin).

But you can do even better than that - you should aim for 40-times points whenever you can.

And you can, because eventually each scheme will offer you a reward for spending a minimum amount each week for a set number of weeks (ie $50 a week for four weeks to earn 10,000 bonus points).

Woolworths (and, less frequently, Coles) will also try to tempt you with up to a dozen weekly points "Boosters", offering 20 times points on certain items that you've bought before.

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Activate your Boosters.

You earn points on Boosters in addition to other offers. So if you're already spending $200 in a month to get your 10,000 points (50-times points) but within that $200 you spend, for example, $20 on Boosted products, you're earning 70-times points on that part of your shop.

And it's not unusual to be offered a further five-times points to buy, for example, fresh dairy products or frozen foods. If you have a Booster on, say, cheese (go on, say cheese) then that cheese would be worth 75-times points to you!

Set up different shopping habits for each of your three accounts with each supermarket.

You'll want to use Boosters as much as possible, but you probably don't need a fridge full of cheese. So buy poultry with one account, meat with another, and dairy with the third. This will ensure a decent spread of Boosters across high-value products.

Shop with partners.

Coles' Flybuys is associated with Target and Liquorland, and Woolworths' Everyday Rewards embraces Big W. The happiest moment in my year-long points quest came when I received an offer of 600 points to buy anything from Big W. I bought a pack of two erasers, which cost me 50 cents and yielded a magnificent 1200-times points per dollar. Scaled up, I'd need to spend only about $11 to earn the airfare between Sydney and Melbourne. And I'd own 44 erasers.

Treat 'em mean to keep 'em keen, and regularly enjoy a bit on the side with your ex. The more you spend with either supermarket, the less it will offer you to keep spending. As soon as Woolworths' incentives shrink, you must ghost Woolworths and return to Coles. The longer you stay away, the more the rival will offer you to come back and, with six accounts across two supermarkets, you will always have a decent offer from one or the other.

Use your freezer.

If you have a Booster on rump steak for one week, buy all the rump steak you will need for a fortnight and freeze it: do the same with bacon, chicken, salmon etc.

Do not spend above the lower limit.

If you're offered a reward to spend $50 a week for four weeks to earn an extra 10,000 Flybuys points, that's a magnificent 50-times points, as long as you spend only $50. But every dollar you spend over the minimum reduces the average point yield per dollar spent at Coles. You'd be better off shopping at Woolworths.

Now use your points to buy a return airfare from Australia to Europe.