Hi, We are wanting to book the first leg of our RTW flight from MEL to CDG. We are aware that as we aren’t booking the whole flight path we will incur the change of flight cost when we call Qantas to book the remaining flights. We can’t wait though as we want the fly specifically on Qatar, so prepared to bear the extra cost.
I have been using Qantas.com.au website searching for a Qatar flight for 2 from MEL to CDG and the only flights currently available is China Airline (MU) which isn’t even a OneWorld partner. I called Qatar and Qantas and neither could tell me when the Qatar Business Class awards will be released. We are now 251 days out from travel and still nothing.
Would anyone have any idea when Qatar award flights for business class will appear in the Qantas website?
The thing about using frequent flyer points to fly is that it involves flexibility, and (at times) compromise. That’s the “price” you pay for using points rather than money. If you’re absolutely unwilling to compromise about flying Melbourne to Paris on Qatar on August 27, then I really don’t like your chances.
I’ve just had a quick look and the issue is the Melbourne to Doha leg: there’s plenty of availability from Doha to Paris.
To get to Doha on Qatar, it looks like you’ll need to be flexible/compromise in 3 ways:
Departure city. There’s nothing at all from Melbourne. You’ll have better luck from Adelaide or Sydney. Either pay to get to one of those cities, or incorporate it into your RTW booking if you can.
Airlines. There’s availability on Malaysian Airlines to Kuala Lumpur and/or Cathay to Hong Kong, and from there there’s some Qatar availability to Doha and from there to Paris.
Dates. Even with the above, I saw nothing on Aug 27 but there’s more availability from August 30 on.
Maybe someone else on this forum (I’m looking at you, @djtech !) can pull a miracle out of a hat, but my advice would be to cut your losses and book using the above strategies sooner rather than later.
We are quite flexible and have also searched for flights to Brussels and Amsterdam. No joy there either. There were some Cathay flights but mainly China Eastern. Nothing from Sydney or Adelaide for Qatar either - appears that Qatar’s reward seats are released much later.
Having said all that, we have actually 2 flight itineraries - flying Eastward (my hubby’s original itinerary) and Westward (due to articles saying it minimises jet lag). Same cities but in reverse order.
Reverting to our original plan of flying East from MEL - SFO we found rewards business class on JAL for 28 Aug 20. Booked that quick smart and we are stoked!!!
JAL being one of the airlines we would want to experience on business class so a great start. We are hopeful that we will get Qatar further down the track.
Ours is a 7 week RTW so it will probably take us some time to book the whole itinerary.
Glad that things seem to be working out! I’m sure you’ll get to experience Qatar at some stage – as many people have often pointed out, Australia is a bit of a “bottleneck” as far as reward flights are concerned but flights from other departure cities tend to be easier to find.
Qatar is 361 days in advance through Qantas (choose flexible with dates to get the calendar to pop up) . There was been no availability into/out of Sydney and Melbourne for the past week or so, but there has been flights in and out of Adelaide.