How to fly a family of 4 from Sydney to Johannesburg in peak season with 400,000 Qantas points?

Hi there Hackers! Looking for some help with the best way to fly from Sydney to South Africa (either Johannesburg, Cape Town, George or Port Elizabeth airports) departing around the 27th December and returning around the 19th of January 2020 utilising 400,000 Qantas Frequent Flyer points. I’ve checked and Qantas has no award seat availability around our dates currently. We are a family of 4 with 2 adults and 2 children aged 2 and 5 at the time of flying. Ideally we would like the travel time to be as short as possible but are happy to overnight or have a few days in another city along the way. Thanks in advance for any advice and tips!

Hi Jade,

As you’ve discovered, getting reward tickets during school holidays – especially the December/January holidays – is no easy feat. This is particularly true if you’ve missed the period 11-or-so months in advance when seats first become available, and especially so for Qantas which releases award seats to its Gold-and-above frequent flyers first. To make things even harder, there are 4 of you.

You may have missed the boat already, so to speak, but there’s also a chance that you can still find seats. The key, though, is flexibility. Be flexible with dates, departure points, and destinations. It will be extremely difficult to get seats out of anywhere in Australia on Qantas, and likewise difficult to get seats out of Sydney on any airline… but maybe you can try, for example, searching for Emirates seats out of Adelaide and fly to SA via Dubai? Or via Doha on Qatar? Failing that, you could try paying for flights out of Australia to somewhere in Asia, and flying to SA from there.

Get out your fine tooth comb and something may open up. All the best!

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