Are the costs of Velocity and Krisflyer award seats increasing?

[souheilelkhoury]

HI all, This may be a stupid question, but have the points required for business class flights skyrocketed? I had a look at some pricing for next year just to get an idea of cost and return from MELB to Rome was 800k-1 million velocity points!
Is that normal? I priced it out earlier in the year and it was maybe half that.
Is it a short term spike or does the points cost usually mirror real life price cost due to demand? i am not going until 2025 but just trying to figure out how many points i will need for a family of 4

thanks

[w.hiew]

Should I be focusing my efforts in collecting Krisflyer/Velocity points vs Qantas for business class family trip to Europe?

You want to be looking for “reward” seats, which are limited in supply but cost a fixed and generally much lower point/mile costs. The ones you see all the time and like in your case are anytime seat or a term I can’t exactly remember because I try to avoid it if I can. These anytime seat costs are not fixed as it depends on the revenue fare (cash fare) and convert to point/mile costs at a very low rate (~0.6 cents per point). As long as the flight has a seat bookable with $, you will find ther…

[djtech]

While we cannot speculate as to whether prices will change by the time it hits 2025, the advice about the difference between reward flights and points plus pay style redemptions still stands as @w.hiew pointed to.
For a trip to Europe, you should expect to pay the top band in terms of awards pricing. For Velocity this comes out to the below prices for a one-way flight in Economy, premium economy, business and first respectively:
75,000 112,500 139,000 203.000

[souheilelkhoury]

that sounds like a much more reasonable amount! by the looks of it, i think Singapore airlines are going to be a better option with more supply if i transfer to Kris flyer points

[souheilelkhoury]

Thanks @w.hiew. Do you know how i search for reward flights and not anytime flights?

[djtech]

For finding reward flights check out the following two pointhacks guides:

What is a reward seat and how does it work? - Point Hacks

How to efficiently search for reward seats

Transferring to Singapore Krisflyer does open you up to more options but remember you will take a hit to your points balance (transfer rate is 1:1.55) and the redemption rates for some awards are higher but in some cases also lower. Good thing is that Singapore doesn’t charge carrier surcharges unlike Velocity.