Best FF program to book award flights

[dks83]

Hi all,

im currently in the process of trying to book award business class flights for myself and my wife for early next year. How ever we would be leaving Australia and going to the USA for work first and then moving on to London and paris.

I would like to book the three international legs on my FF points. melbourne - lax, lax-London . Paris-Melbourne.

im currently a qantas FF, virgin frequent flyer holding all my points in Amex and transferring when I need them however I'm having a really tuff time finding flights and they are costing a huge amount of points as I guess they are not a basic return flight , as I would like to travel to multiple countries.

Any suggestions would be great including perhaps joining a different FF program or one world etc to try and find more carriers with award flights availible.

Any help would be great

Cheers

 

[Mwenenzi]

Welcome to the forum

What you are wanting is 3 one way flights (or a RTW).
You can only use the miles/points from the programs you are a member of (VA & QF)
Virgin frequent flyer does not (yet) have many international partners.
OneWorld is a marketing organization and not a freq flyer program (ffp). Qantas are a OneWorld member.
Any OW airline will have very approximately the same award availability. But some only have award access at 330 days & others 353 days (like QF)

Amex web site will have info on what other ffp's your Amex points can be transferred to

Any businesses class ticket from UK has a very high UK tax

Earn & burn and status benefits are what ffp's are about

 

[RooFlyer]

Just adding to what Mwenenzi said.

In general award seats in J across the Pacific on QF (and in fact J in general) can be as rare as hen's teeth unless you get in close to the 353 day release time. We all rail about this. Those of us with higher 'status' can get Award seats released on request; may or may not be your case.

You didn't mention your QF or VA status; unless Gold or above (and probably Platinum), you might be better off joining the AA program and seeing if they have greater availability. Will obviously be more appropriate with LAX-LHR as well.

Have a look at this thread: . to see if an around-the-world approach would be better.

 

[Gogo65]

We are doing something similar.
I had 250k qantas points and 500k Amex points
I'm flying SYD-lax with qantas in J, my husband is coming a few days later on virgin.
We have then booked JFK-CDG in J using qantas points. We are then coming home Rome-SYD with Singapore airlines.
Going through London increases taxes substantially, hence us avoiding London

If all your points are with Amex try flying virgin to LA cheap taxes and currently have 15% bonus. Also Singapore have 15% discount if award flights are booked online ( although points are low taxes are higher)