We have been looking for Classic reward seats from Australia to Dubai and apart from the odd economy seat there are none for almost 12 months ahead. Does anyone know why this is? We have been madly saving and using points for years and have never experience such a lack of availability. Is it time to stop collecting points?
This is not true. For example, first class on Emirates from Perth is available on Wednesdays and Sundays in March.
Ah ha! Perth is one place we did not try from. Thanks!
Hi @Anzac65
Qantas Frequent Flyer has about 13 million members. During the pandemic, with borders closed, those members continued to accumulate points but had nothing to spend them on.
Now that borders are opened, many million QFF members, with large stashes of points, have been competing for (by my calculations) only a few thousand international premium seats. Most are taken within days or even hours of being released.
So it’s not at all surprising that flights are particularly difficult to come by at the moment.
It’s not impossible, though: as stated in this recent thread, you just need to be more obsessed with finding seats than usual! Being as flexible as possible also helps, as always.
Time to stop collecting points? Not at all. My wife and I have travelled to Europe and back in business class twice since borders opened, and I’ve just booked a third trip for next year. However, try as I might (and I tried!) I could not find any flights using Qantas points. If you haven’t already, now is definitely the time to start branching out into other FF programmes or, even better, a flexible rewards programme.
Qantas points are the easiest points to accumulate, but the hardest to use.
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