I have been looking for some time now at booking a trip to Lord Howe Island from either Brisbane or Sydney (don’t mind which) with Qantas points on a reward seat. Unfortunately these seats seem to never be available/are booked immediately upon becoming available.
Are you able to advise how many and when these seats become available. ie. are the reward seats placed online 353 out when flights become available for booking with Qantas or is it closer to the date.
no hard and fast rule about how many or when. With most routes you will find have that an initial few will drop in 353 days out, and then more may be made available if the airline feels that the flight is selling below their expectations. The airlines want to make sure that the flight leaves full so if sales have been slow they’ll open up more, however if sales are strong then unlikely they’ll open up more.
With lord Howe it is a little different, as qantas basically has a monopoly on the market out of both Sydney and Brisbane. Lord Howe is a very popular and beautiful spot, and given that only qantas fly to or from the island you might well find that they’ll never open up award space. Given qantas’ position in this market, they may quite rightly feel in a superior bargaining position and know that the demand is there and that if they leave it people will pay the asking price and the flight will go full.
It sucks but I reckon the only chance your points have of doing you any favours here is with an anyseat redemption, which is appalling value for money. This is a common issue that many have griped about, both here and on other forums and sites before, so I wouldn’t hold out too much hope.
Only thing you can do is check religiously, and hope for the best.
Hi
I have successfully redeemed 2 award return flight from Sydney to Lord Howe Island in Sep this year. Here is what I found:
– There is definitely award flight available to LDH but there is no pattern to predict when even if you book a year out
– I have tried to spot these rare gold for the past 3 years. I spotted them most of the times but you will need to be flexible in term of dates & months
– To discover the award availability, you basically need to keep searching month by month (of course from your preferred month of travel)
– The challenge is often you find the outbound leg but return leg is often none or too far out
– Maximum availability of award seat per flight is 2
– Taxes payable per person per leg is almost $170
In my case, I spotted these rare 2 return award flight in early Aug for early Sep departure (staying 3 nights). I saved approximately $1,600 by burning 32,000 QFF points.
