Qantas readies ‘massive’ release of international reward seats including Business and First
Be ready to pounce at 11:00 am (AEDT) on Friday 24 February.
Posted:
February 21, 2023 - 1:00 pm
What we'll be covering
If you’re itching to use up your bountiful balances of Qantas Points, get your trigger fingers ready. On Friday 24 February 2023, Qantas is set to release another swathe of Classic Flight Reward seats across its international network.
Qantas has confirmed the release to Point Hacks, with Qantas Loyalty CEO, Olivia Wirth, noting that international flights were still one of the most popular ways to use Qantas Points.
We’re releasing tens of thousands of new Classic Flight Reward seats to international destinations to make it easier for our members to use points towards their next overseas trip.
The number of points required to book reward seats hasn’t increased in years … so these seats present great value.
– Olivia Wirth, Qantas Loyalty CEO, 21 February 2023
Qantas will also extend its commitment to boosting reward seat availability on international routes by 50% until the end of the year. While most of those seats will be in Economy, we’ll still see smatterings of premium cabin availability.
UPDATE: The Qantas website is still under heavy load, but if you have partner points currencies such as British Airways Avios or Asia Miles, you may have better luck booking through those channels. We’ve found good Business and First Class availability across a range of dates.
More details are in our social post below. Missed out? Register for our reward seat alerts now and you’ll be able to see today’s latest email as soon as you’ve signed up.
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Upcoming reward seat release details
- Seats are released from 11:00 am (AEDT), on Friday 24 February 2023
- Extra reward seats will be available across all cabins (including Business and First) across the full international network of over 30 destinations.
We don’t yet know what travel period the seat release spans, but we expect it will be for flights until December 2023. Not all dates will be included, so you should consider multiple travel periods in your pre-planning. Make sure you’re familiar with how to search for Qantas reward seats and how to bring up the reward seat calendar.
Example reward seat costs
Here are some popular routes and the number of Qantas Points required to book, plus fees and taxes. All values are one-way and per person.
| Route | Economy | Business |
| Sydney-London | 55,200 pts + $233 | 144,600 pts + $443 |
| Brisbane-Los Angeles | 41,900 pts + $209 | 108,400 pts + $334 |
| Sydney-Tokyo (Haneda) | 31,500 pts + $148 | 82,000 pts + $198 |
| Melbourne-Auckland | 18,000 pts + $157 | 41,500 pts + $157 |
| Sydney-Fiji (Nadi) | 18,000 pts + $107 | 41,500 pts + $107 |
Summing up
Qantas is releasing another tranche of Classic Flight Reward seats, all at once. This is a departure from the pre-COVID tradition, where a few seats were regularly released 353 days in advance. Premium cabin availability was also initially limited to Gold Frequent Flyer status members and higher.
Since we’ve moved on from the pandemic and started travelling again, this has all gone out the window. Instead, Qantas now seems to prefer to release big chunks of availability every few months.
At Point Hacks, we regularly cover these releases through our social channels and through our free reward seat alert newsletter.
The upside to this is usually all Qantas members, including Bronze and Silver, can see the seats at the same time. There are also usually more seats available per flight than we’d normally expect – more than four Business Class seats per flight is not unheard of.
Some will say these releases are a PR stunt (which is true enough), but we’ve also found that many readers have actually found enough seats to book their next family holiday in a premium cabin. That’s what we like to hear.
If there’s a downside, it’s that everyone will be descending on the seats all at once. You’ll need to be quick to make travel plans, especially as fee-free changes and cancellations aren’t offered anymore. And if past releases are anything to go by, we expect the Qantas website will take a hammering once the seats drop…
We’ll be sending out a ‘reward seat alert’ newsletter this Friday once we’ve seen some of the routes available. Be the first in the know – sign up for our reward seat alerts for FREE!
Qantas readies ‘massive’ release of international reward seats including Business and First was last modified: August 25th, 2023 by
No Business class ever appeared – not sure whether to take the PE seat and keep watching or wait……
Do you really think this outcome was a surprise to anyone at QF?
No, mate, I don’t at all.
It’s just my opinion, but there is the hypothetical possibility that they decided that the cost and effort of scaling the system outweighed the upside of a seamless and efficient customer experience. They may be assuming that the system overload will be temporary and people will come back and try again later.
On the one hand it can piss customers off that the system crashes, on the other hand it creates a sense of competition and, ironically, the perceived value of the reward goes up.
Customers have already been primed to expect poor experiences (e.g. handling of credits, baggage issues, long wait times to talk to a call centre agent, etc). If customers wear such stuff and the airline can get away with it, why seek to elevate the customers’ booking experience?
Meanwhile, QF PR is excellent. And the media suck it up.
1. The initial hyped over-promise of “1 million seats”. Anticipation.
2. Then the under-deliver – website crashes, can’t get anything. Disappointment / frustration.
3. Then you may scramble something between 1 and 2. Relief / satisfaction.
Well OW…clearly you didn’t spin around 3 times and spit to cancel the juju.
Couldn’t even book/search a simple SYD-MEL flight for two weeks time with cash, wasn’t even points searching. So the whole site was buggered for hours.
The more I think about it, the more I’m tempted to conclude that the wunderkinder at QF were quite happy to let the site crash.
Now they can claim that the event was SO POPULAR that it EXCEEDED ALL EXPECTATIONS. They stoked a feeding frenzy. They made those awards ever more precious.
Meanwhile, many report on other blogs that smart frequent flyers holding points in partner programs had a field day – they simply bypassed the QF website and located award seat availability on websites such as ExpertFlyer and then contacted AA to redeem using their AAdvantage miles, etc. The QF members were effectively locked out of their own program promotion. The best award seats such as first class SYD-LAX and MEL-LAX were hoovered up quickly – I found many dates offering 2 first class award seats on those routes and they all went within a couple of hours.
I’m sure that Wirth et al believe they did a wonderful job.
But maybe they also have a problem…if the promotion was intended to cleanse liabilities on their accounts arising from unredeemed QF points (at a time of higher revenue / profit) then it may not help having premium award inventory hoovered up by partner programs with folk using non-QF points for the gig…..;)
We may also see inventory filter through as people cancel their AA point bookings ice everyone acted in haste…
It meant there was no transparency with respect to what was actually available. No one knows as it was not possible to search.
QF can now claim they made X available, that popularity was even greater than expected, unfortunately there were sone technical issues, will work on this going forward, but thousands of reward seats sold to happy passengers …
Time to plan an upgrade to Mosman Manor.
Makes me think its worth having a AA and BA membership and sign up for offers – and then redeem their seats via QF.
Cut up your credit cards and go back to cash. It’s better for you and better for small business. The points are not worth the surcharges.
Status is nice to have, but you’re only going to get that if you travel for work anyway, so no effort required.
Perhaps…QF FF has its strengths and weaknesses – just like any other FF program.
The trick is to forget status, ditch your cobranded airline credit cards for generic ones, and seek out each FF program’s strengths…..;)
I got my extended family of 7 to Europe this coming December – January. BA there ad JAL return. Mix of premium economy and business seats. Got the dates we wanted. Family split across a couple of different flights. And higher surcharges than QF. But overall I was happy with the deal.
I have done enough business travel for lifetime gold. Will continue to travel QF when I can. But reward seats will usually be on another carrier.
Nailed it….;)
Totally opsnormal at QF
Some even made it onto the BA website (a friend just booked YVR-SYD business class on Avios).
Utterly predictable that QF would run such a promo without scaling their booking system. One can but assume the IT folk would be shaking their heads and muttering I told you so!
But the PR and loyalty gronks achieved their PR goal of attracting national publicity in the mainstream and travel media.
Meanwhile, the data released in their press release are utterly meaningless without qualification. But, hey, the media don’t stop to think or ask any questions, just faithfully reproduce what they are told.
Hopefully, some members will eventually find what they seek as those who get pissed off give up as QF generates yet more entirely preventable resentment and distrust.
Cue quote from the movie “Snatch”:
“But you do have all the characteristics of a dog, Gary. All except loyalty.”
I always thought that Qantas released international travel reward seats roughly 11 1/2 months in advance, and so I was dismayed to find that there was nothing at all available for me in January, 2024. Now I know that they are releasing these things in batches, it makes so much more sense.
It sounds like January, 2024 is not about to be released, but I’ve signed up to the email alert now – thanks!
If only Qantas could sort out its customer focus enough to TELL their FF members about this sort of thing directly and routinely. It would considerably enhance their reputation, imho. Mind you, I fly out of Perth, and so I think we get a pretty poor deal flight wise anyway…
I’m in ACDT; just wanting to make sure I’m online at the right time!
Cheers
I looked at classic reward business class flights this morning for 10 September 2022 SYD/HK and return SING/SYD 18 days later as we are going on a cruise starting in HK and ending in Singapore. The FF points required for the first flight state at the top of the screen 68400 points but when you move down to book it says 540,200 points required to book. Similar situation coming back from Singapore. Do you know what QF is doing here as very confusing. Love your weekly emails – thanks.
While you do get lounge access from International Business to Domestic Economy (for example), both Qantas and Oneworld lounge rules don’t cover domestic-only connections.
But it doesn’t hurt to try 🙂