Oneworld Classic Flight Reward Discussion - The Definitive Thread

[repete]

"Out of curiosity have you received your final confirmed tickets for all 4 travellers."

Ah, the million dollar 'ticketing' issue. This has been a whole new world for me trying to organise some family RTW tickets with Qantas. So many changes (by them, not me) and every time I lose the e-ticket and most times end up calling to try and push it through again.
Imagine my astonishment today when a separate $ booking on AirNZ was changed by them - in my inbox <1min later was a separate email to the notification with my new itinerary and e-ticket numbers for all 6 passengers!!! This sort of thing is possible - Qantas, please take note!

 

[kctt]

I can see U availability TPE-HKG when I search two segments: HKG-TPE 14/01/23 Returning TPE-HKG 15/01/23. 20 000 pts each way in U.

Thanks. I can search now when putting together HKG-TPE and TPE-HKG but TPE-HKG has no business ticket for any day in 2023. Strange that you can see business ticket.

 

[sqrt()]

Thanks. I can search now when putting together HKG-TPE and TPE-HKG but TPE-HKG has no business ticket for any day in 2023. Strange that you can see business ticket.

View attachment 281066

I'm silver, but didn't think that made a difference for awards only a few months away.

 

[Guvner]

I'm not sure QFF status is a factor with Partner awards.

 

[algae]

Just booked a flight for next year. However got a 5685UI error when I included the last leg online. So I booked the first 5 legs online and called to add the last one. However they couldn't see availability, even though I can see it online (and if I start a new booking, I can click through to the payment page).

Granted the rep stayed on the phone with me for an hour (although after every question had to go check with her team) and was overall very helpful. She said they'd have a look and call back tomorrow (i'm not hopeful of this happening).

Anyone know what the problem might be?

Below booking details (2x people all flights in business).
Flight 1: PER>HKG>YYZ - Perth to Toronto
Flight 2: YUL>LHR>MAD>RAK - Montreal to Marrakech (I plan to change this to the direct RAM flight once available)
Flight 3: RAK>LHR - Marrakech to London
Flight 4: LHR>ARN - London to Stockholm
Flight 5: ARN>HEL>KIX - Stockholm to Osaka

^This is all booked and confirmed, no problem. But adding another flight causes the 5685UI.
I asked the rep to book the below in Business (showing available online), but she couldnt find it.
Flight 6: KIX>NRT>KUL>PER - Osaka to Perth

When she couldn't do that I asked for KIX>KUL>PER in economy (just to have a booking locked in as this was also available on the Qantas website). She could find this flight, but she couldn't add it.

Any thoughts on why? Only coming in at 30,168 miles on Great circle.

Took three calls to Qantas to sort this out!
First rep - helpful but inexperienced. Promised a callback which never came.
Second rep - unhelpful, put me on hold and then hung up.
Third rep (at 11pm AEST) - Helpful and mostly competent! (She did say that she couldn't add the flight at first because every leg needed to be reticketed and it wouldn't let her because there wasn't availability. A nervous wait on hold while I asked her to confirm that with a supervisor and it was all sorted. At the start of the call she did recommend making a seperate booking for this last flight instead of adding it as she would have to recalculate fees on every leg and Reissue. So clearly some training needed!

Now to wait and see if it gets ticketed in 24h as promised... it's appeared on my booking, but no e-ticket number yet in CMT and no email ticket...

 

[FishFood]

CMT

What's CMT?

 

[Guvner]

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[adamk8]

Out of curiosity have you received your final confirmed tickets for all 4 travellers.

It's been ticketed except the final bit (BKK-SYD-MEL), I am waiting to see if they can open up seats for business class SYD-MEL (if not we should be fine to go Y though).

I would be buying a lottery ticket with that degree of luck!

Definitely luck involved! But also applied all the great knowledge I found from this forum and other frequent flyer tips. Plus PlatOne helps with unlocking seats

Strategy was:

• Booked first parts of trip right when they get released earlier in the year and incrementally added to the trip
• Used expertflyer for alerts and checking routes myself before calling Qantas
• Super flexible with dates, basically checked first 2 weeks of December for any route out of AU that could get us to EU. For return, we were ok coming back basically any time in Jan (as it turns out only last 2 weeks were viable anyway).
• Flexible with routes and stopover locations, we just wanted to do AU-EU-AU and exact routes or stops we were flexible with

 

[levelnine]

Plus PlatOne helps with unlocking seats

That is a crucial piece of context (not sure if you mentioned before?). I doubt a 4x J OWA would be achievable for anyone short of P1, especially in the current award environment, but happy to be proved wrong.

 

[adamk8]

That is a crucial piece of context (not sure if you mentioned before?). I doubt a 4x J OWA would be achievable for anyone short of P1, especially in the current award environment, but happy to be proved wrong.

You may be right! It was certainly why I could get BKK-SYD-MEL opened. The rest of the legs are non-QF OWA, I'm not sure how much it helps with those (?).

 

[algae]

Now to wait and see if it gets ticketed in 24h as promised... it's appeared on my booking, but no e-ticket number yet in CMT and no email ticket...

As of 5pm AWST it wasn't ticketed. Plus I saw the ticket numbers for all original flights in CMT had disappeared.

Fearing the worst I called Qantas and immediately connected to someone. Asked them to ticket it and 11 mins later was all done and I got the ticketing email. Surprisingly easy.

 

[levelnine]

You may be right! It was certainly why I could get BKK-SYD-MEL opened. The rest of the legs are non-QF OWA, I'm not sure how much it helps with those (?).

It doesn't help directly for non-QF flights, but the legs into and out of Australia, where you need QF to release space, are always the hardest, so P1 helps where it is actually needed.

Furthermore, P1 still helps a lot for non-QF legs because you are more likely to get a competent HBA/NZ agent when you call to add legs to your booking. As the past 50 pages of this thread shows, it is near impossible to reliably get a competent agent if you are not P1, making it extremely difficult to reliably add non-QF legs to OWA bookings. If you're lucky enough to find 4x J seats on a non-QF flight, you need to be doubly lucky to get a phone agent that can successfully add them to the booking.

 

[djkelly69]

I doubt a 4x J OWA would be achievable for anyone short of P1, especially in the current award environment, but happy to be proved wrong.

Not quite as good, but I have a 3x J OWA booked for Dec/Jan later this year. Wife is Gold so that helped a bit with QF availability to get out of Aus.

TBH basically the only times we were able to have flights actually added was when we managed to get through to HBA.

 

[adamk8]

It doesn't help directly for non-QF flights, but the legs into and out of Australia, where you need QF to release space, are always the hardest, so P1 helps where it is actually needed.

Furthermore, P1 still helps a lot for non-QF legs because you are more likely to get a competent HBA/NZ agent when you call to add legs to your booking. As the past 50 pages of this thread shows, it is near impossible to reliably get a competent agent if you are not P1, making it extremely difficult to reliably add non-QF legs to OWA bookings. If you're lucky enough to find 4x J seats on a non-QF flight, you need to be doubly lucky to get a phone agent that can successfully add them to the booking.

Makes sense. The agents I spoke to were very good! I did find the availability myself for the majority of the legs but there were a few tricky ones and particularly the return to AU which they did a lot of searching for me.

 

[cjd600]

That is a crucial piece of context (not sure if you mentioned before?). I doubt a 4x J OWA would be achievable for anyone short of P1, especially in the current award environment, but happy to be proved wrong.

APR/MAY 2023

SYD-HND JL stop
HND-JFK JL stop
JFK-LHR BA stop, transit Paris
CDG-HEL-LAX AY stop
LAX-HND-SYD JL

4 x J as a mighty NB
(well ........LAX-HND-SYD we did have to split 2x2 a day apart, but the rest is the 4 of us together)

 

[levelnine]

(well ........LAX-HND-SYD we did have to split 2x2 a day apart, but the rest is the 4 of us together)

As I mentioned, the Australian legs are the ones where it is near impossible to get 4x J. From what I've seen, and as your SYD-HND leg indicates, JL seems to be one's best bet.

 

[cjd600]

As I mentioned, the Australian legs are the ones where it is near impossible to get 4x J. From what I've seen, and as your SYD-HND leg indicates, JL seems to be one's best bet.

Yes, ideally would have been SYD-EUR-USA, but JL into JFK was our only way to EUR for 4, the long way round......different from when we first started this award in 2019 and had 4J SYD-DOH-CDG on QR.....and CX into LHR for 4 if we wanted....ah, the good ol' days of choice and availability

 

[sqrt()]

After realising I managed to book a RTW award ticket where AY1339 HEL-LHR departed (1930 on 01/08) before AY144 BKK-HEL arrived (05:50 02/08), I called a few times to try get the AY1337 changed to 03/08 (no availability on 02/08, apparently).

First call the agent tried to charge me an additional $1500 in tax for moving it two days forward... (HUAC)
Second call I managed to get the booking changed but no new ticket appeared...
Third call I was told the booking was in a queue to be ticketed, and no booking could be ticketed manually (huh?) (HUAC)
Fourth call I got a super competent agent who ticketed it straight away.

CMT and E-ticket from Finnair website confirms change. No additional charge. I won't be able to add another stopover but pretty happy I can stop calling QF for now (even if there's no wait time now).

 

[levelnine]

ah, the good ol' days of choice and availability

It certainly is one of the more frustrating aspects of the OWA. The game has changed considerably since the pandemic, and all for the worst. On top of it being way more difficult to book due to call centre issues and now more expensive due to increased fuel surcharges, availability into and out of Australia has plummeted with reductions in QR releases, almost complete disappearance of CX, huge demand for QF seats and difficulties in using JL due to border closures.

 

[algae]

Is the finnair website garbage or is something up with my booking?

CMT shows my ARN>HEL>KIX flights as ticketed with a ticket number. Qantas sent me the email with pdf invoice. In theory should be fine. Yesterday the finnair website found my booking, however would load forever when i tried to load the seat selection page.

Now today i'm getting "No booking was found. Please check the name and booking reference." when i go to manage my booking on the finnair website.

I suspect this is just a website glitch as a result of me being too keen to book seats and their website isnt very good..... but i could be wrong....