Business Class flights from Australia to the United States are one of the “holy grails” of frequent flyer point redemptions. Redeeming Qantas or Velocity points to fly Business Class to the USA is often amazing value.
Unfortunately, finding premium cabin award availability on trans-Pacific flights can be very difficult. But there’s some good news if you have Velocity Frequent Flyer points – or points with any Star Alliance airline.
United Airlines has just dropped a lot of Business Class award availability on its routes from Australia and New Zealand to the United States. These Polaris Business seats are available to book as reward seats using Velocity points.
United Airlines routes with award availability
In addition to Auckland-San Francisco, United currently flies five non-stop routes between Australia and the USA:
- Brisbane-San Francisco
- Sydney-San Francisco
- Melbourne-San Francisco
- Sydney-Los Angeles
- Melbourne-Los Angeles
This will increase to ten routes between Australia, New Zealand and the USA by the end of 2023. United uses a mix of Boeing 787s and Boeing 777s on its Australia & New Zealand routes, which all offer comfortable lie-flat beds in Polaris Business Class.
Reward seat availability varies by route. But, as the AFF community has noticed, there is currently particularly good availability in Business Class on the Melbourne-San Francisco service.
You can find Business reward seats for travel on various dates between now and August, as well as a small number of dates all the way through to November 2023.
On some dates, there are even enough reward seats available to book your whole family into Business Class with Velocity points on the same flight to/from the USA!
United doesn’t generally release Saver/partner award seats in trans-Pacific Business Class when flights initially go on sale around 11 months in advance. Instead, United tends to release reward seats in batches closer to the departure date. The majority of reward seats that are currently available are for travel dates within the next 2-3 months.
Booking United Business Class with Velocity points
United Airlines reward seats are available to book on the Virgin Australia website. Select “Use Velocity Points” when conducting your search, and look for “UA” coded flights in the search results.
A United Business reward seat between Australia and Los Angeles or San Francisco would generally cost 95,500 Velocity points + taxes. Relative to the cost of buying a Business Class ticket, that’s an incredibly good deal.
There are even reward seats available during the upcoming school holidays.
There are also United reward seats available from Auckland and Papeete to San Francisco.
If you don’t have Virgin Australia Velocity points available, you could also book with a Star Alliance frequent flyer program. As United Airlines is a Star Alliance member, the same seats are available to book through programs including Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer, Air Canada Aeroplan and Avianca LifeMiles. Of course, you could book using United MileagePlus miles (at the lowest Saver rate) too.
Finding United Business Class award availability
Available reward seats should appear on the Virgin Australia website. But you can only search on Virgin’s website for seats on one route and date at a time.
A more efficient way to find reward seats is to use the United Airlines website. Use the month-long availability calendar to search for seats a whole month at a time, and look for award availability in the 80,000-90,000 mile range.
Alternatively, you could use the Seats.aero website and set the mileage program being used for your search to that of any Star Alliance airline.
See our guide to finding Velocity reward availability to the USA for more details about searching for United Airlines award availability.
Business Class availability to Honolulu with Hawaiian Airlines
Hawaiian Airlines, another Velocity Frequent Flyer partner, also continues to make more Business Class reward seats available from Sydney and Auckland to Honolulu at the moment. Hawaiian Airlines even seems to be making progressively more reward seats available over recent weeks.
If that’s of interest, have a read of our guide to redeeming Velocity points on Hawaiian Airlines.
