The Qantas website has a well-known limitation that you can only use it to search for and book flights departing from certain countries. This can be particularly frustrating when searching for partner airline award flights from overseas destinations.
Obviously you can book flights from Australia or any destination where Qantas flies its own aircraft. But it’s not possible to book flights on the Qantas website with a Point of Sale in a majority of countries. Excluded countries include places like Qatar, Sri Lanka and Morocco which are hubs for Oneworld partner airlines.
So, which countries does the Qantas website support bookings from, why aren’t there more countries, and what’s the workaround?
Which countries can you book & search from on the Qantas website?
Australian Frequent Flyer recently checked and found that the Qantas website allows users to search for flights originating in just over 50 countries.
Bookings are only accepted by the Qantas website if the Point of Sale is a country shown in green on the map below:
As you can see, Qantas bookings can’t be made online if point of origin for the ticket is anywhere in Central or South America (except Chile), Africa (except South Africa) or most of the Middle East (except the UAE, Jordan and Israel).
It’s normal that airline websites may not support bookings departing from every single country. But by comparison, the Virgin Australia website allows users to search and book flights departing from around 128 countries – more than double. These are the countries:
In the case of the Virgin Australia website, online bookings are possible from almost every airport where Virgin Australia or a partner airline flies to. This doesn’t include some destinations offered by Hawaiian Airlines, South African Airways and Virgin Atlantic, but online Velocity reward seat bookings are not possible for travel with these airlines anyway.
That’s not to say that the Virgin Australia website is perfect. It does have its own flaws, such as the inability to make multi-city or mixed-class reward bookings. Available flights don’t always show up and workarounds are needed to book reward seats on certain routes on the Virgin Australia website like Brussels-Singapore, which aren’t offered as an option when you search from the home page. (In this case, you can simply search for a different route and then edit the search on the next page to input Brussels as the origin and Singapore as the destination.)
Why doesn’t the Qantas website offer bookings from more countries?
Qantas didn’t directly address our question about why flights in many countries can’t be booked on the Qantas website. But Australian Frequent Flyer understands that it’s likely because Qantas has not set up the ability to accept payments in those countries and/or local currencies.
Qantas did say that the Points of Sale available on its website cover the vast majority of bookings that customers make, but added that they are always reviewing options for adding new Points of Sale based on customer demand.
The airline also says that it has improved its website booking capability for frequent flyers in recent years by rolling out a single booking engine that lets customers combine Classic Flight Rewards and “cash” bookings in a single flow.
How to search and book flights departing from countries not supported by the Qantas website
It’s still possible to make bookings or enquire about Classic Flight Reward availability from any country through Qantas’ contact centres. Qantas says that its contact centre booking and service fees are waived when the Point of Sale is not available on Qantas.com.
Unfortunately, booking a Classic Flight Reward over the phone can be easier said than done, especially when dealing with one of Qantas’ outsourced call centres based overseas. In one recent example, an AFF member tried booking a Royal Jordanian flight with Qantas points departing from a city in Iraq. While there was award availability, the call centre could not manage to sell the ticket.
I’ve also personally had this problem when trying to book an Emirates flight from Cyprus using Qantas points. My first call was answered by Qantas’ South African call centre, who told me there was no award availability. In this case, I used the “HUACA” (Hang Up And Call Again) method and on the second attempt got through to someone at the excellent Hobart call centre who was easily able to see the availability and book the flight for me. Unfortunately, it’s now almost impossible for most Qantas Frequent Flyer members to access the Hobart call centre.
When booking a return or multi-city trip on the Qantas website, you can still include flights departing from unsupported countries as long as the first flight on the ticket departs from a country that is supported by the website.
For example, it would be possible to make a multi-city booking where the first sector on the booking is from Melbourne to Sydney, and the second sector is from Colombo to Melbourne.
This works because the Point of Sale is in Australia and the entire booking would therefore be charged in Australian dollars. However, if using this workaround to book your flights online, beware that you must fly the first sector on the ticket or any subsequent flights will be cancelled!
You can also use the above method to search for award availability from Colombo to Melbourne. Then, once you’ve found a suitable flight, call Qantas to complete the booking.
The downside here is that the award availability when your booking Point of Origin is in Sri Lanka could be different to the availability for bookings with a Point of Origin in a different country. So, even if you can find award availability using this workaround, you can’t be 100% sure that the flight will be available as a standalone booking.
If you’re specifically looking for award seats on Oneworld airlines, you could instead use the British Airways website or Japan Airlines website to search for seats. You do need to be a member of each airline’s frequent flyer program to search on their websites, but British Airways Executive Club and JAL Mileage Bank are both free to join.
You can leave a comment or discuss this topic on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum.
