Oneworld Classic Flight Reward Discussion - The Definitive Thread

[adamk8]

Following up on this. I have something booked right now, it's not ideal but it's workable. For those interested. The itinerary starts in early Dec and finishes in late Jan:

• MEL-HND
• NRT-HEL
• HEL-FCO
• MAD-DOH
• DOH-BKK
• SIN-PER
• PER-MEL (last one booked separately as I reached max 5 stops for 318k J)

Managed 4 J tickets for all segments.

The hardest part is getting back in AU basically any time in January. There was barely even a single Y award ticket from anywhere in Asia. Best they could do was book later in Jan with SIN-PER (still nothing to SYD or MEL).

I'm hoping more inventory will open up so I will have to monitor. Perhaps DOH-MEL will come back.

What is the best way to monitor for seats opening up? Manually checking? Or best to use expertflyer or a similar service to set alerts? (will that work?).

Another follow up.

I tried expertflyer alerts but nothing came through. Qantas told me that basically almost all routes back into Australia in all of Jan had no availability in business (let alone 4 seats). The exception was back via Finland and Japan (same as our outbound). Qatar re-started a lot more flights back to AU but even with that there was no business award availability.

However, I lucked out and Qantas were able to unlock seats for me from BKK-SYD (they told me this one had the best chances).

So basically we are all set now. Full itinerary is:
MEL-NRT-HEL-FCO/MAD-DOH-BKK-SYD-MEL

4 business class seats the whole way, leaving early Dec, coming back late Jan! Never thought we would be able to secure that.

 

[levelnine]

4 business class seats the whole way, leaving early Dec, coming back late Jan!

I would be buying a lottery ticket with that degree of luck!

 

[aikman]

I asked the rep to book the below in Business (showing available online), but she couldnt find it.
Flight 6: KIX>NRT>KUL>PER - Osaka to Perth

I think that agents needs to use a different system to see JL domestic but if they don't know this system exists then you have no chance.

 

[kctt]

So basically we are all set now. Full itinerary is:
MEL-NRT-HEL-FCO/MAD-DOH-BKK-SYD-MEL

4 business class seats the whole way, leaving early Dec, coming back late Jan! Never thought we would be able to secure that.

That's a great win with 4 business class tickets + high season in Christmas holiday + business seats on Qantas flight

Does anyone know if Taipei is a valid stop on owa reward / classic reward flight?

I can go from Paris -> Helsinki -> Hong Kong with finnair then Hong Kong -> Taipei with Cathay pacific
But searching Taipei back to Hong Kong returns error Taipei is not valid for classic reward.
It's weird that I can get classic reward flight from Hong Kong to Taipei but not on retur

 

[sqrt()]

That's a great win with 4 business class tickets + high season in Christmas holiday + business seats on Qantas flight

Does anyone know if Taipei is a valid stop on owa reward / classic reward flight?

I can go from Paris -> Helsinki -> Hong Kong with finnair then Hong Kong -> Taipei with Cathay pacific
But searching Taipei back to Hong Kong returns error Taipei is not valid for classic reward.
It's weird that I can get classic reward flight from Hong Kong to Taipei but not on return

Are you adding the TPE-HKG segment after HKG-TPE in multi-city search? If you just search for the TPE-xx_ segment you will (probably?) get an error.

I can see U availability TPE-HKG when I search two segments: HKG-TPE 14/01/23 Returning TPE-HKG 15/01/23. 20 000 pts each way in U.

No shortage of availability on days around those.

 

[Matt_01]

Another follow up.

I tried expertflyer alerts but nothing came through. Qantas told me that basically almost all routes back into Australia in all of Jan had no availability in business (let alone 4 seats). The exception was back via Finland and Japan (same as our outbound). Qatar re-started a lot more flights back to AU but even with that there was no business award availability.

However, I lucked out and Qantas were able to unlock seats for me from BKK-SYD (they told me this one had the best chances).

So basically we are all set now. Full itinerary is:
MEL-NRT-HEL-FCO/MAD-DOH-BKK-SYD-MEL

4 business class seats the whole way, leaving early Dec, coming back late Jan! Never thought we would be able to secure that.

Out of curiosity have you received your final confirmed tickets for all 4 travellers.

 

[repete]

"Out of curiosity have you received your final confirmed tickets for all 4 travellers."

Ah, the million dollar 'ticketing' issue. This has been a whole new world for me trying to organise some family RTW tickets with Qantas. So many changes (by them, not me) and every time I lose the e-ticket and most times end up calling to try and push it through again.
Imagine my astonishment today when a separate $ booking on AirNZ was changed by them - in my inbox <1min later was a separate email to the notification with my new itinerary and e-ticket numbers for all 6 passengers!!! This sort of thing is possible - Qantas, please take note!

 

[kctt]

I can see U availability TPE-HKG when I search two segments: HKG-TPE 14/01/23 Returning TPE-HKG 15/01/23. 20 000 pts each way in U.

Thanks. I can search now when putting together HKG-TPE and TPE-HKG but TPE-HKG has no business ticket for any day in 2023. Strange that you can see business ticket.

 

[sqrt()]

Thanks. I can search now when putting together HKG-TPE and TPE-HKG but TPE-HKG has no business ticket for any day in 2023. Strange that you can see business ticket.

View attachment 281066

I'm silver, but didn't think that made a difference for awards only a few months away.

 

[Guvner]

I'm not sure QFF status is a factor with Partner awards.

 

[algae]

Just booked a flight for next year. However got a 5685UI error when I included the last leg online. So I booked the first 5 legs online and called to add the last one. However they couldn't see availability, even though I can see it online (and if I start a new booking, I can click through to the payment page).

Granted the rep stayed on the phone with me for an hour (although after every question had to go check with her team) and was overall very helpful. She said they'd have a look and call back tomorrow (i'm not hopeful of this happening).

Anyone know what the problem might be?

Below booking details (2x people all flights in business).
Flight 1: PER>HKG>YYZ - Perth to Toronto
Flight 2: YUL>LHR>MAD>RAK - Montreal to Marrakech (I plan to change this to the direct RAM flight once available)
Flight 3: RAK>LHR - Marrakech to London
Flight 4: LHR>ARN - London to Stockholm
Flight 5: ARN>HEL>KIX - Stockholm to Osaka

^This is all booked and confirmed, no problem. But adding another flight causes the 5685UI.
I asked the rep to book the below in Business (showing available online), but she couldnt find it.
Flight 6: KIX>NRT>KUL>PER - Osaka to Perth

When she couldn't do that I asked for KIX>KUL>PER in economy (just to have a booking locked in as this was also available on the Qantas website). She could find this flight, but she couldn't add it.

Any thoughts on why? Only coming in at 30,168 miles on Great circle.

Took three calls to Qantas to sort this out!
First rep - helpful but inexperienced. Promised a callback which never came.
Second rep - unhelpful, put me on hold and then hung up.
Third rep (at 11pm AEST) - Helpful and mostly competent! (She did say that she couldn't add the flight at first because every leg needed to be reticketed and it wouldn't let her because there wasn't availability. A nervous wait on hold while I asked her to confirm that with a supervisor and it was all sorted. At the start of the call she did recommend making a seperate booking for this last flight instead of adding it as she would have to recalculate fees on every leg and Reissue. So clearly some training needed!

Now to wait and see if it gets ticketed in 24h as promised... it's appeared on my booking, but no e-ticket number yet in CMT and no email ticket...

 

[FishFood]

CMT

What's CMT?

 

[Guvner]

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[adamk8]

Out of curiosity have you received your final confirmed tickets for all 4 travellers.

It's been ticketed except the final bit (BKK-SYD-MEL), I am waiting to see if they can open up seats for business class SYD-MEL (if not we should be fine to go Y though).

I would be buying a lottery ticket with that degree of luck!

Definitely luck involved! But also applied all the great knowledge I found from this forum and other frequent flyer tips. Plus PlatOne helps with unlocking seats

Strategy was:

• Booked first parts of trip right when they get released earlier in the year and incrementally added to the trip
• Used expertflyer for alerts and checking routes myself before calling Qantas
• Super flexible with dates, basically checked first 2 weeks of December for any route out of AU that could get us to EU. For return, we were ok coming back basically any time in Jan (as it turns out only last 2 weeks were viable anyway).
• Flexible with routes and stopover locations, we just wanted to do AU-EU-AU and exact routes or stops we were flexible with

 

[levelnine]

Plus PlatOne helps with unlocking seats

That is a crucial piece of context (not sure if you mentioned before?). I doubt a 4x J OWA would be achievable for anyone short of P1, especially in the current award environment, but happy to be proved wrong.

 

[adamk8]

That is a crucial piece of context (not sure if you mentioned before?). I doubt a 4x J OWA would be achievable for anyone short of P1, especially in the current award environment, but happy to be proved wrong.

You may be right! It was certainly why I could get BKK-SYD-MEL opened. The rest of the legs are non-QF OWA, I'm not sure how much it helps with those (?).

 

[algae]

Now to wait and see if it gets ticketed in 24h as promised... it's appeared on my booking, but no e-ticket number yet in CMT and no email ticket...

As of 5pm AWST it wasn't ticketed. Plus I saw the ticket numbers for all original flights in CMT had disappeared.

Fearing the worst I called Qantas and immediately connected to someone. Asked them to ticket it and 11 mins later was all done and I got the ticketing email. Surprisingly easy.

 

[levelnine]

You may be right! It was certainly why I could get BKK-SYD-MEL opened. The rest of the legs are non-QF OWA, I'm not sure how much it helps with those (?).

It doesn't help directly for non-QF flights, but the legs into and out of Australia, where you need QF to release space, are always the hardest, so P1 helps where it is actually needed.

Furthermore, P1 still helps a lot for non-QF legs because you are more likely to get a competent HBA/NZ agent when you call to add legs to your booking. As the past 50 pages of this thread shows, it is near impossible to reliably get a competent agent if you are not P1, making it extremely difficult to reliably add non-QF legs to OWA bookings. If you're lucky enough to find 4x J seats on a non-QF flight, you need to be doubly lucky to get a phone agent that can successfully add them to the booking.

 

[djkelly69]

I doubt a 4x J OWA would be achievable for anyone short of P1, especially in the current award environment, but happy to be proved wrong.

Not quite as good, but I have a 3x J OWA booked for Dec/Jan later this year. Wife is Gold so that helped a bit with QF availability to get out of Aus.

TBH basically the only times we were able to have flights actually added was when we managed to get through to HBA.

 

[adamk8]

It doesn't help directly for non-QF flights, but the legs into and out of Australia, where you need QF to release space, are always the hardest, so P1 helps where it is actually needed.

Furthermore, P1 still helps a lot for non-QF legs because you are more likely to get a competent HBA/NZ agent when you call to add legs to your booking. As the past 50 pages of this thread shows, it is near impossible to reliably get a competent agent if you are not P1, making it extremely difficult to reliably add non-QF legs to OWA bookings. If you're lucky enough to find 4x J seats on a non-QF flight, you need to be doubly lucky to get a phone agent that can successfully add them to the booking.

Makes sense. The agents I spoke to were very good! I did find the availability myself for the majority of the legs but there were a few tricky ones and particularly the return to AU which they did a lot of searching for me.