I am going to start collecting rewards points for international business class travel with my wife. I’ve read a heap of the guides here (they are great!) but I have a couple of questions about this still.
Are Velocity points or flexible credit card reward points easier to redeem for international business class flights than Qantas points? From what I’ve read on this site this seems to be true but I’d like to hear people’s experience with this.
We tend to travel overseas once a year. I am looking for opinions on is it better to use the reward points for a business class trip every year or save them for a few years and do a big round the world trip? We are happy to do either approach.
How far in advance do you generally need to book business class flights with reward points?
It’s exciting starting the point hacks journey. I still remember the endorphin effects from our first 2 years of point travel.
These are only based on my experience and opinions, others will have differing views so please take from it what you may. Regardless, there would be no bad decisions (only bad if you continue to only use cash ONLY and subsidise other Point Hacker travels ).
For higher chance of finding award seats, you can’t beat flexible points as the advantage of that is you can only choose to transfer the flexible points to a targeted airline program AFTER doing the searches and finding award seats. The disadvantage is usually, it is much easier to accumulate Qantas and Velocity points in Australia. You see the avenues of doing this is endless. I do find Krisflyer still reliably releasing award seats but it is harder to accumulate Krisflyer miles in Australia.
On paper, you can always extract more value out of round the world itineraries. However, you will have multiple times more challenges in finding award seats for all the flights you want. The most important thing when finding award seats is being flexible with dates and routes. You will find the major bottle neck in award seat availability is for flights in and out of Australia. Once you are outside Australia, options generally open up.
I’ve personally never redeemed a RTW itinerary. It never suited our travel habits. But plenty here have done more than one RTW trips.
I try and book 11-12 months in advance (once the calendar opens). This doesn’t suit everyone. I also accept that I rather pay to cancel or change my bookings than struggle to find last minute award seats.
In general, booking earlier should give you better award seat availabilities. However, some airlines do release more seats closer to the flight date.
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