How I Make Qantas Reward Availability Work for Me

Qantas Frequent Flyer members often struggle to find Classic Reward seats to international destinations in premium cabins. Indeed, it can be extremely difficult to find multiple Business Class reward seats to popular places like London, Athens or New York. Qantas releases very few seats to these kinds of places on its own flights, and there are only so many rewards on partner airlines to go around.

Despite this, I’ve personally been able to get lots of value from my Qantas points over the years. I redeem dozens of reward flights every year, worth many thousands of dollars, and don’t usually have too much trouble finding seats. But that’s because I’m not trying to book seats that are near-impossible to find. Instead, I take advantage of Qantas Frequent Flyer’s strengths.

Qantas Frequent Flyer is not the program for getting your family to Europe in Business Class

I often see Qantas Frequent Flyer members complaining that they can’t find Classic Reward seats to Europe in Premium Economy, Business or First Class, or that the only available options require multiple long layovers.

The reality is that Qantas Frequent Flyer just isn’t the best program if you want to redeem your points for convenient, direct flights to Europe in Business Class. That’s not to say it’s impossible to find any seats – there are some out there and you may get lucky sometimes. Platinum frequent flyers also have the option of requesting extra Classic Reward seats. But the demand for these reward seats far exceeds the supply.

At the end of the day, this is not how Qantas Frequent Flyer is truly intended to be used. If it was, you wouldn’t have to resort to trickery with the multi-city booking tool to get available connecting flights to Europe to appear on the Qantas website.

I fly multiple times per year to Europe, and Qantas Frequent Flyer helps me to save money getting to Europe in comfort. I’ll explain this in more detail later in the article.

But if I just wanted to easily book premium cabin flights from Australia to Europe with short connections, I wouldn’t be collecting Qantas points.

Every program has its own strengths and weaknesses – use them to your advantage!

The frequent flyer programs of Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Qatar Airways – and to an extent, Virgin Australia – all provide better and more options to get to Europe. For that reason, my points-earning strategy is to diversify and collect points with multiple different airlines.

Having credit cards that earn flexible points currencies really helps with this. For example, if you have Amex Membership Rewards points, you can choose to transfer your points to any of the programs I just mentioned, whenever you want. You can simply choose whichever airline has seats when you want to travel, and transfer points into that airline’s program when you’re ready to book.

Programs like Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer are perfect if you want to book multiple premium seats from Australia to Asia or Europe. But it’s not the best program, for example, if you want to fly to the United States or New Zealand.

So, I save my Qantas points for routes where Qantas offers plenty of Classic Reward availability and redemptions are good value. There are a lot of these – they just aren’t necessarily in the most obvious places. And where using Qantas Frequent Flyer doesn’t make sense, I use something else.

Where does it make sense to redeem Qantas points?

Although many Aussies save up their Qantas points to book long-haul flights, redeeming on domestic routes can be equally good value – or even better. Domestic Qantas flights within Australia are often quite expensive, but Classic Reward seats come at a fixed low price.

I save a lot of money by booking Classic Reward seats on domestic routes like Canberra-Melbourne or Canberra-Brisbane, not just in Business but also in Economy. This may not be as “aspirational” as redeeming points to Europe. But compared to a typical Economy airfare of around $300 for a flight like Canberra-Brisbane, 8,000 Qantas points + $74 for a Classic Reward is a good deal.

Other routes where I find Qantas points relatively easy and good value to use include:

• Australia to Pacific Islands (such as Tonga, Samoa, Solomon Islands or Vanuatu)
• Australia to New Zealand
• Australia to Chile (flying to Santiago with Qantas or LATAM Airlines)
• Australia to Johannesburg, flying Qantas on the Airbus A380 (although I wouldn’t try to use Qantas points to fly beyond Jo’burg)
• There’s plenty of availability to Los Angeles in Economy, and sometimes also Premium, Business or First
• Trans-Atlantic flights, including from Europe to North America and Europe to South America on partner airlines
• Domestic USA flights on American Airlines or Alaska Airlines

If I’m flying Qantas anyway and have the possibility to upgrade with points, I’ll often also request a Classic Upgrade Reward. Upgrades don’t always come through, but they’re solid value if they do.

Qantas reward availability into Asia

I also find that Qantas often has decent Classic Reward availability on specific point-to-point routes into Asia. You might not always get a seat to Singapore or Japan, but you often can use points on Qantas routes like:

• Sydney-Jakarta
• Melbourne-Jakarta
• Sydney-Manila
• Brisbane-Manila
• Melbourne-Hong Kong
• Sydney-Bengaluru
• Melbourne-Delhi

You can often also find seats to Asia on partner airlines, including on routes like:

• Perth/Melbourne/Sydney/Adelaide-Kuala Lumpur on Malaysia Airlines
• Melbourne/Sydney/Brisbane-Taipei on China Airlines
• Sydney/Melbourne-Colombo on SriLankan Airlines
• Sydney-Singapore on British Airways
• Melbourne-Singapore on Emirates (although this route will end soon)

When I travel to Europe, I’ll sometimes use Qantas points to book a positioning flight from Australia to Asia. I’ll then stop over in Asia for a couple of days, which I prefer anyway as it lessens the jetlag.

After a few days of great food and warm weather, I’ll then travel from Asia to Europe on another ticket – often a paid Business Class fare on a different airline that costs a fraction of the price of tickets from Australia to Europe. This strategy works well for me as it gets me to Europe in comfort, while saving me a fair bit of money.

Qantas doesn’t explicitly promise impossible rewards

In fairness, Qantas doesn’t explicitly promise that its frequent flyers can redeem points for multiple Business seats to London. In promotional material, Qantas usually promotes Economy Classic Reward flights on routes that do actually have seats…

Lately, when Qantas has promoted premium cabin reward flights to destinations like London, Tokyo and Bali, it’s been promoting Classic Plus redemptions. These typically cost a lot more than Classic Reward flights but are much more widely available.

Summary

If you use Qantas Frequent Flyer as it’s intended, you can probably make it work well for you.

I personally get lots of value by using my Qantas points where it actually makes sense, but using other programs – or buying cash tickets – where it really doesn’t.

If you find that you can’t get reward seats to places you want to go using Qantas points, it may be worth considering switching to a different program.

Some people will probably disagree with my take on this, and that’s of course totally fine! You can share your own thoughts with the AFF community by leaving a comment in the thread linked below.

Matt Graham

The editor of Australian Frequent Flyer, Matt's passion for travel has taken him to over 90 countries… with the help of frequent flyer points, of course!
Matt's favourite destinations (so far) are Germany, Brazil & Kazakhstan. His interests include aviation, economics & foreign languages, and he has a soft spot for good food and red wine.

You can connect with Matt by posting on the Australian Frequent Flyer community forum and tagging @AFF Editor.