Looking for help with the following itinerary on a rtw ticket. Happy to pay for someone’s services.
I’m fairly flexibible, in that we’re happy to travel any time after 15 June 2024.
Looking at:
Business RTW reward (2x318,000)
Australia to Athens (stay around 1.5 weeks)
Athens to Rome (stay around 1.5 weeks)
Rome to France (stay around 2 weeks
France to London stay around 1.5 weeks
London to New York stay around 1.5 weeks
New York to Australia
Idea is that we would use Rome/France/London as hubs and hop around to some other counties.
Completely happy to fly to a Malaysia/Bali/Singapore first
Any advice or whatnot is greatly appreciated including when I should book, what airlines I should target etc. I’ve followed all the guides and can’t really seem to find any flights
I’ve fired up an Excel sheet and gotten the following days for your flights and date open on Qantas is in brackets. I have an ongoing issue with uploading a screenshot so see list below.
Australia - Athens 20/6/24 (3/7/23)
Athens - Rome 30/6/24 (13/7/23)
Rome - France 10/7/24 (23/7/23)
France - London 24/7/24 (6/8/23)
London - New York 3/8/24 (16/8/23)
New York - Australia 13/8/24 (26/8/23)
Now as you can see, some of the flights are not yet open.
Qantas calendar opens 353 days in advance. However, for Qantas metal (flights), this depends on your Qantas frequent flyer status. If you are lowly Bronze (no status) like me, you can only see award seats on some premium cabins 297 days. This article would explain it better than me (The definitive guide to when frequent flyer program reward calendars open). You should be able to see award seats on partner airlines (if they are also open) when Qantas calendar opens (the Qantas status restrictions does not apply).
However (big however), calendar opening doesn’t mean award seats would be available. Every airline has their own pattern in which they release award seats. Some release as soon as their calendar opens reliably (some don’t). Some releases sporadically without rhyme or reason. Some releases left over award seats 3-21 days before the flight date.
The award space bottle neck is always on flights in and out of Australia. So if you are open to positioning yourself to South East Asia and starting your RTW itinerary from there, you will have much better luck finding award seats.
Try playing around with dummy dates on the Qantas - Multi-city search page. It is generally very challenging to find premium cabin seats to Europe/US so you have to be patient and flexible with dates/routes.