My partner and I just successfully booked a RTW trip using the classic rewards flights with most of the flights on business class (318,000 points offer). “Successfully” meaning our payment has gone through, points deducted and we’ve received an e-ticket Itinerary and Receipt. It’s possible that flights may change or get cancelled but I believe we’re 85% there.
This forum has been really helpful in making our booking a “success” so I wanted to give back and give my two cents plus advice on the whole process (we ran into some hurdles that others should definitely be aware of):
Our trip is MEL > HKG > LHR > JFK > HND > KUL > MEL and will take about 2 months. It’s planned over September and October 2023.
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Where to start?
Inserting dates into the multi-city flight option on the Qantas website without knowing if there’s any classic rewards flights will result in an error most of the time. I’d recommend searching each leg of your journey individually by selecting the “one way” option for a rough date of your choosing. Click Search. Then select the “Classic Rewards” filter and flick around until you can find a classic rewards flight on a date that satisfies you (keep note of the business class ones if that’s the reward you’re going for). Note down the flight details (date especially). Do the same for each leg of the journey. -
Break up larger legs into smaller ones if you can’t get the dates you want
We originally wanted to go MEL > LHR (London) but there were just no classic flight rewards for any of the dates we wanted. However there were options for MEL > HKG and then HKG > LHR with the dates we wanted so that’s what we did. We didn’t get business class the entire way but we get to step out and grab a bite in Hong Kong for the same price so why not? -
Booking over the phone - READ THIS
So we noted down all the available flights using the classic flight rewards for the dates we wanted and were ready to put through the booking online. We selected it all the flights in one booking but for some reason after our personal details section we kept getting an error. We then decided to call up and get them to create the booking over the phone. Firstly, just be ready to be firm and hand hold them through the process. The people over the phone don’t care about you getting your Business Class RTW trip and they’re probably understaffed and have no incentive to work harder. The first person my partner spoke to entered in all our flights and then just said he couldn’t do it/couldn’t see the flights we wanted. So my partner prompted him to confirm some of the flights and that’s when he started giving in. He ended up putting through the booking, asked for my credit card details and we got a reference number. “The itinerary will be sent to you within 48 hours”. We thanked them and hung up. We checked our Qantas account and we could see the reference number with all the flights. But our points hadn’t been deducted and my card hadn’t been charged yet. I felt it was odd and didn’t want to get excited yet. We called up again to confirm why the points hadn’t been deducted and it turns out the consultant we spoke to earlier didn’t initiate the payment flow (i believe it was called smart flow or something with “flow” in the name). This consultant then took my card details and processed it on the spot and I could see it in my app plus we could also see the points deduction finally. So I don’t know why we got a reference number originally but no transaction occurred the first time. Luckily we called.
tl;dr: DO NOT TRUST THE REFERENCE NUMBER. Reference Number <> Booking Finalisation. If booking over the phone, make sure payment is made whilst on the phone - ask them to initiate the smartflow/payment flow process. Check it’s left your bank account. E-ticket wasn’t sent to us over the phone but we received it right after our call. It wouldn’t hurt to confirm if they’ve placed the e-ticket request in a queue so it will get sent to your email whilst on the phone with them.
Other notes:
- If you want to book more than 6 flights (which you can’t do online), you can do this over the phone and it still qualifies for the One World Classic Rewards offer.
- Phone bookings incur a points fee (which I feel is ridiculous given we have to tell them exactly what to do) but that was the only way that worked for us