Thought I'd share an experience booking a J Oneworld award incase there's something useful in it (or just to laugh at some of the call center advice).
Was starting to panic last week when I started looking for return tickets to SE Asia for the Christmas holidays and seeing absolutely stupid economy ticket prices and no awards (unfortunately I've only got QF points). Instead found an award to LAX just after Christmas and decided to keep adding segments, finally getting to where I wanted to be via London, Colombo and Singapore, and then back into Aus in at the end of the school holidays.
Got as far as I could with multicity 'tool', then called up and the lady easily added on the segments I wanted and said she would call back two days later to collect the taxes and points. Of course she never did so I called back and was told the ticket had some notes on it from the reservations department, including one saying that Malaysia Airlines was no longer part of Oneworld, or that MH no longer allowed booking of Oneworld awards. After 40 minutes of her arguing that the Qantas website was wrong and had not been updated yet to reflect MH's sudden departure, the end of call survey suddenly appeared ( to which she got a 1,1,2)
Called back and thankfully heard an Australian accent, and an affirmative response to the question, "are you in Hobart?". After confirming that MH was still in fact part of Oneworld (I could almost hear him shaking his head in disbelief), the operator had a quick look at the ticket, fixed a few errors and said he would call back in ten minutes when he was ready to collect the taxes. He ended up calling back twice within half an hour to fix a few more errors such as stopovers that I hadn't planned within the award rules, and within a few hours the ticket has appeared with a 081 prefix in my inbox. Needless to say the end of call survey was now a 5, 5, 1.
Interesting advice at the end of the call, operator did say straight out that large and complex award bookings like this are up to the whims of the partner airlines, and if they don't accommodate a changed/cancelled flight, Qantas is unlikely to be able to help. I think we all know this is true.
Admittedly this was a pretty complex ticket that need manual tax calcs and all sorts of other stuff that inexperienced operators wouldn't know, so my suggestion would be for Qantas to add a Oneword Award Menu option to their phone menu so things like this could go to someone who does know.
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One last thing, has anyone else noticed when on hold sometimes the music stops briefly, and it sounds like your about to be spoken to again, but then it goes back to hold music? Seems to me like some call center operators are just putting you on hold, then checking if you are still there while hoping that you've got bored and hung up.
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