Requested two business class seats to be released on Saturday as a Platinum member:
- 1 x J SYD-LAX 20 May - declined after several days of a placeholder booking giving me hope
- 1 x J LAX-SYD 6 June - approved
The above serves as a data point, what follows is just narrative on the process and a related booking.
The placeholder booking was actually the MEL-LAX leg of a SYD-MEL-LAX journey. The SYD-MEL leg was approved and the MEL-LAX leg eventually declined.
When I requested the reward seats to be released I said I would be happy to go either direct, or indirect via Melbourne or Brisbane, so the powers that be must have tried a couple of different options as the outbound trip under consideration was indirect and the return trip direct.
What was strange is that the MEL-LAX placeholder booking was visible only in the Qantas app. The website showed only the SYD-MEL leg of the outbound journey, but the MEL-LAX leg wasn't visible at all.
It seems the Qantas app accesses the underlying booking system in a different manner to the website. And, in fact, Qantas staff use another access method yet again. Which is why you sometimes get different results and access to different functionality talking to a call centre staff member, going through the website, or using the app. For example, you can add a carbon offset to a trip through the website or app when booking a rewards flight, but the call centre could not do this for me.
Which is why I ended up booking the outbound and return legs as separate trips - one in J (released upon request via the call centre) and one in Y (booked normally through the app, with carbon offset added - which also got me to Green Tier).
Similarly, I tried to book the economy outbound leg on the morning after the rewards system was down overnight for maintenance, so no classic rewards flights appeared at all on the website. But they
did appear via the app.
When speaking to a call centre rep a few days later on a related issue (the economy leg didn't ticket due to a hiccup with the extra legroom seat I selected) she said that classic rewards flights booked via the app go through as "points plus pay" bookings and so (if I understood her correctly) had to be manually transformed into class rewards booking before being released.
TLDR: Qantas booking systems and processes seem to bolted together willy nilly.