J & F Award Availability to/from Europe in peak times

[Paddy55]

I’m planning a trip with Mrs Paddy to Europe next year, departing Sydney for Western Europe 1st half June, returning from Eastern Europe 1st half July.

Since last travelling I’ve dropped from WP to LTS (sob) and find when booking 2 J and/or F Award Seats I get 2nd bite of the cherry after all you WP and SG have snaffled all the good seats (sob).

The light at the end of the tunnel could be Emirates whose seats are released about 334 days ahead, instead of QF/BA/CX at 353 days.

My question is whether fellow AFF’ers generally have good fortune picking up 2 x J/F Emirate Award seats, especially in prime travelling times such as June and July?

 

[Doctore1003]

You should have no trouble getting 2 seats if you’re grabbing them as soon as they are released. Remember also to be flexible with departure and destination cities, eg. if there is nothing out of Syd, check out Mel, Bne and others. EK fees will be hefty though. To avoid those, you could try CX, which releases seats first anyway.

QF elites get priority access to QF seats only, not those of partners.

 

[Mattg]

QF elites get priority access to QF seats only, not those of partners.

This is true. That said, Qantas is not releasing any J/F award availability on its own flights to Europe anyway - not even to Platinum members (short of calling up to request the release of seats) - at the moment.

 

[amaroo]

Requesting release didn't work for me (this time) a couple of weeks ago. So for next year we just booked QF J to Tokyo, then transiting to JL F to LHR ..... on the way back it's CX F to Hong Kong and then a lazy CX J back to Oz.

Easy Peasy.

 

[ellen10]

This is true. That said, Qantas is not releasing any J/F award availability on its own flights to Europe anyway - not even to Platinum members (short of calling up to request the release of seats) - at the moment.

Why is Qantas not releasing any J/F awards to Europe?

 

[Toad]

Why is Qantas not releasing any J/F awards to Europe?

Probably because they want to give you a taste of what they think of your status and hard earned points are really worth but I might be wrong.

 

[Paddy55]

Appreciate the quick responses, and had forgotten about looking for availability from Melbourne or Brisbane.

Puzzled that there's a fair bit more availability if you look at Multi-City i.e. SYD-HKG and then HKG-AMS but the price for those two legs is a fair bit more than a SYD-AMS is (and should be). I've seen from other threads that QF is pretty sanguine about this and not inclined to refund the point difference.

Sorry to hear QF is not releasing J/F to Europe at the moment... a Code of Conduct wouldn't go astray I think.

 

[Paddy55]

Thanks for the advice.

Pleased to say I snagged 2 x J/F Awards on Cathay SYD-FRA next June.
20,000 points cheaper flying into FRA than, say CDG or LHR.

A puzzling, and annoying thing, I found is that on the Calendar, after selecting all the travel classes, QF was showing only economy class awards on 11th Jun, but clicking on that economy class thingy revealed a J/F Award (and no Ys)... so don't get put off by what the Calendar says!

 

[Pierre_a]

This is true. That said, Qantas is not releasing any J/F award availability on its own flights to Europe anyway - not even to Platinum members (short of calling up to request the release of seats) - at the moment.

When I booked an xmas visit back to the uk a year or two again qantas didn't even release any economy availability! Blocked out between December 14th and Jan 26th entirely if I remember rightly.

Fortunately Emirates released plenty and I got 3 x J returns MEL - LHR in peak summer holiday season.

 

[HockeyMonkey]

Somehow managed to get a 2 x J MEL-CDG award tickets last year for travel this week. It was 345 days out. I was surprised they lasted 8 days, maybe someone cancelled.

The return for 4 weeks later was rather stressful, watching each day from various departure points, managed to get ZRH-HKG on a Tuesday but the HKG-MEL leg never opened up. Ended up getting HKG-ADL on the Thursday. Stop over it is then.

So it seems availability is day of week dependent

 

[ellen10]

Somehow managed to get a 2 x J MEL-CDG award tickets last year for travel this week. It was 345 days out. I was surprised they lasted 8 days, maybe someone cancelled.

The return for 4 weeks later was rather stressful, watching each day from various departure points, managed to get ZRH-HKG on a Tuesday but the HKG-MEL leg never opened up. Ended up getting HKG-ADL on the Thursday. Stop over it is then.

So it seems availability is day of week dependent

Well done, yes it is a stressful procedure. I'm not looking forward to getting my routing in a couple of months time.

 

[GoldCanyon340]

The return for 4 weeks later was rather stressful, watching each day from various departure points, managed to get ZRH-HKG on a Tuesday but the HKG-MEL leg never opened up. Ended up getting HKG-ADL on the Thursday. Stop over it is then.

I'm not adverse to paying the 5,000 point penalty to cancel or amend bookings if a better option arises. One of my flights from London to Australia this year is an award and I got LHR-HKG-ADL on BA/CX with a mix of F/J cabins. I switched to LHR-SIN-SYD-ADL all on QF when the P1 team found me a seat on QF2. Paid the 5,000 point penalty but easily worth it as my original HKG-ADL would have been in J and now I have F all the way to Australia. Also got a few thousand points back. even after the 5k penalty, due to the original being a Partner Award.

 

[Berlin]

Pleased to say I snagged 2 x J/F Awards on Cathay SYD-FRA next June.
20,000 points cheaper flying into FRA than, say CDG or LHR

Well done! And yes, I always end up flying into Frankfurt too because somehow Qantas makes that route cheaper than all the others, I wonder if that is a leftover from when QF still had their own direct flights there? I’m going in two weeks (paid, not on redemption) and even going via London, Frankfurt was around $800 cheaper than let’s say Paris or Munich.