I’m trying to find some reward seats back to Aus at the beginning of August i.e. 1st-3rd.
I will be in Athens at this time, and I’m happy to backtrack to say Rome/Barca and hop across countries like Dubai Singapore Hong King etc.
Anyone have any tips or itineraries for me to consider?
Hi @BowserSZN
How many points do you have, and with which frequent flyer and/or credit card programmes?
Let us know what you have and we’ll go from there.
Which cabin are you open to flying in?
How many seats are you after?
Summer Olympics this year doesn’t help with award availability too.
Thanks all,
Qantas points, 800k. The best I can find is a reward flight from Athens to Dubai, but then the Dubai-Home cash fair is around $2k per ticket which seems crazy unless we want a long layover in india / singapore etc.
You’ll struggle to find Business class availability until any “last-minute” seats get released over the months and weeks closer to the time.
If you’re willing to fly Economy, you could hop on Royal Jordanian and fly to Bangkok via Amman, and then Qantas/Jetstar back to Australia. There’s plenty of availability.
When you say “last minute” reward flights, how last minute are you talking?
Great question! Airlines reach the point where they determine that they won’t sell every seat on a particular flight. At that point they would usually decide to start to release some seats as reward seats.
That happens any time between a few months before a flight, and a few days before a flight. During high demand times (eg. the European summer), it may not happen at all. It’s totally up to the airlines to determine and they take lots of different factors into account, so it’s extremely difficult to predict if/when it will happen.
Case in point: last September/October my wife and I were in Europe, and I’d noticed that Emirates had been releasing first-class reward seats about four days before the flights. So, having bragged to several friends and colleagues that I was looking forward to flying home in Emirates first class, four days before we were due to fly home I eagerly logged on, waiting to pounce on those elusive Emirates first class flights … and they weren’t released. The flights I wanted must have been already full. That’s how the frequent flyer game works — you win some, you lose some!