UPDATE on 15 November 2024: This issue is now fixed. You can read the full update here.

Alaska Airlines and Qantas are partners in the Oneworld alliance. In fact, the close partnership between these two airlines pre-dates Alaska’s entry into Oneworld. So, at least in theory, you should be able to redeem Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles for Qantas flights.

Unfortunately, not a single Qantas reward seat has been available to book through Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan for more than two weeks.

Without explanation, Qantas awards simply disappeared from the Alaska Airlines website around the 25th of October, 2024. Alaska’s call centre agents also cannot see any availability.

This isn’t just due to a general lack of reward seat availability, as Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan members can no longer use their miles to book Qantas flights on any route, cabin or date. For example, this is what happens if you try searching for award seats from Sydney to Brisbane – a route with ample availability:

Qantas rewards on this and many other routes are still available to book through other Oneworld partner airlines, including with American Airlines AAdvantage miles, British Airways Avios and Cathay Asia Miles. So, this problem specifically affects Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan members.

The Alaska Airlines website is still selling cash fares on Qantas codeshare flights across the Pacific. Furthermore, Qantas Frequent Flyer members can still redeem Qantas points to book Classic Flight Rewards on Alaska Airlines as of now.

What’s going on?

The Alaska Airlines website still shows Qantas as a partner airline that its Mileage Plan members can redeem miles on.

If this was a permanent change to its partnership with Qantas, I would expect Alaska Airlines to provide notice and an update to members. This hasn’t happened, so my first thought when Qantas award availability disappeared was that it was most likely some sort of temporary glitch.

But this has now been going on for almost three weeks. If the problem was simply an IT bug, I would have expected it to be resolved by now – or at least for Alaska Airlines to provide an update that they’re aware of the issue and working on it. This hasn’t happened either.

Australian Frequent Flyer contacted Alaska Airlines for comment, but we did not receive a response. We’ll update this article if Alaska Airlines does eventually get back to us.

As far as I can tell, this appears to be a deliberate move by Alaska Airlines to block Qantas award space. I’m not really sure why they would do this, but it’s a shame because Mileage Plan awards on Qantas can be good value.

Recently, Australians have been able to (indirectly) transfer Amex Membership Rewards points to Alaska Airlines via Hawaiian Airlines for the first time.

Alaska Airlines is also blocking close-in partner airline awards

In recent days, Alaska Airlines has also started blocking access to most award availability on other partner airlines within 72 hours of departure. I suspect this is for fraud prevention reasons, as many of the award bookings made by mileage brokers or using stolen miles are often for last-minute travel on partner airlines.

This change most likely has nothing to do with Mileage Plan blocking all Qantas awards. But it does indicate that Alaska Airlines is actively interfering with partner award availability at the moment. This could be a further indication that the removal of Qantas awards was probably instigated by Alaska Airlines, rather than the other way around or due to some sort of random technical glitch.

Matt Graham

The editor of Australian Frequent Flyer, Matt's passion for travel has taken him to over 90 countries… with the help of frequent flyer points, of course!
Matt's favourite destinations (so far) are Germany, Brazil & Kazakhstan. His interests include aviation, economics & foreign languages, and he has a soft spot for good food and red wine.

You can connect with Matt by posting on the Australian Frequent Flyer community forum and tagging @AFF Editor.