Advice for Group Booking

[loutkool]

Apologies if this is in the wrong section, this is my first post on AFF.
My wife and I are organising a family trip to Europe. We are both recently Platinum and have just under 2M QFF points available. We are looking to ease the $$ cost of the flights by using points for some of the legs if possible. We are 7 adults and two kids (3 & 5) so understand it is pretty much impossible to get an award flight for everyone.
However, I was wondering if there would be any benefit in trying to have seats released using platinum privileges, I have no idea how this works but have been told it can happen?
We are also open to splitting the group across a couple of fights, maybe getting classic or classicplus one way and paying for the return flight all together.
We are flying out of Melbourne and are looking for any port in Europe, departing any date in December and returning any date in January.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[equus]

paying for the return flight

Internationally, one way revenue flights tend to be WAY more expensive than half of a return.

You would be better off looking for return flights for some members using rewards, and paying return flights for others.

One of the standard approaches is to look for cheaper return flights into Europe from Asia - and look for return award flights to Asia from Australia. The problem with this approach is that your connections would end up unprotected on separate tickets, so you would need to factor in potential accommodation costs for a connection time long enough to accommodate mishaps.

It will help those providing advice if you gave some indication of class of travel. Are you looking at Y only, or something more premium. With young kids, how indirect are you prepared to go to save.

Also need to know how much you value the points vs cash, and how easy they are to accumulate. Many would be horrified, but 2M QFF points on a points-plus-pay can represent around $14K cash off revenue bookings. Not great value, but looking at such a large party, and if factoring in convenience with kids, may be something you would consider.

 

[DejaBrew]

A very warm welcome aboard AFF @loutkool

Requesting the release of award seats is certainly one of the useful privileges of being a QF WP (Platinum), but there's certainly no guarantee that you can get them released. The other thing that may work against you is that Qantas place blackout periods on popular routes at certain times of the year for these seat releases. I suspect that the Summer school holiday period would be one such time, but no doubt others on site will be able to provide a more definitive idea on that for you.

For more detail on requesting the release of award seats, see this thread -:

Thread 'QFF Platinum requesting release of extra Classic Reward seats?'

Oct 29, 2014

View an article on this topic:

How Qantas Platinum Members Can Request Extra Reward Seats

Qantas Platinum and Platinum One frequent flyers can request the release of additional Classic Flight Reward seats on Qantas flights.

www.australianfrequentflyer.com.au

---

Was looking through Frequent Flyer - Flying Qantas and Partner Airlines - Status Credits and Tier Benefits - Tier Benefits today

Seems like access to extra Caward seats is only available to P1 only.

I was under the impression that WP can request extra Caward seats be released where none was available. Or is this an unwritten benefit only?

• Quickstatus
• award availability redeem points
• Replies: 3,106
• Forum: Qantas | Frequent Flyer

 

[loutkool]

Internationally, one way revenue flights tend to be WAY more expensive than half of a return.

You would be better off looking for return flights for some members using rewards, and paying return flights for others.

One of the standard approaches is to look for cheaper return flights into Europe from Asia - and look for return award flights to Asia from Australia. The problem with this approach is that your connections would end up unprotected on separate tickets, so you would need to factor in potential accommodation costs for a connection time long enough to accommodate mishaps.

It will help those providing advice if you gave some indication of class of travel. Are you looking at Y only, or something more premium. With young kids, how indirect are you prepared to go to save.

Also need to know how much you value the points vs cash, and how easy they are to accumulate. Many would be horrified, but 2M QFF points on a points-plus-pay can represent around $14K cash off revenue bookings. Not great value, but looking at such a large party, and if factoring in convenience with kids, may be something you would consider.

Great questions, I should have thought to include that. We are happy with any class, adults are pretty seasoned and we don't mind stopovers as part of the adventure. Due to it being a larger group we can share the kid duties around ;-).
We have found flight options for around $25K in economy and the best we have managed is to bring it down to is $13K plus points. Sounds like that might be the best we can hope for.
As far as getting better value for the points, would it be worth trying for class upgrades or some other option?

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 5:05 PM

A very warm welcome aboard AFF @loutkool

Requesting the release of award seats is certainly one of the useful privileges of being a QF WP (Platinum), but there's certainly no guarantee that you can get them released. The other thing that may work against you is that Qantas place blackout periods on popular routes at certain times of the year for these seat releases. I suspect that the Summer school holiday period would be one such time, but no doubt others on site will be able to provide a more definitive idea on that for you.

For more detail on requesting the release of award seats, see this thread -:

Thread 'QFF Platinum requesting release of extra Classic Reward seats?'

Oct 29, 2014

View an article on this topic:

How Qantas Platinum Members Can Request Extra Reward Seats

Qantas Platinum and Platinum One frequent flyers can request the release of additional Classic Flight Reward seats on Qantas flights.

www.australianfrequentflyer.com.au

---

Was looking through Frequent Flyer - Flying Qantas and Partner Airlines - Status Credits and Tier Benefits - Tier Benefits today

Seems like access to extra Caward seats is only available to P1 only.

I was under the impression that WP can request extra Caward seats be released where none was available. Or is this an unwritten benefit only?

• Quickstatus
• award availability redeem points
• Replies: 3,106
• Forum: Qantas | Frequent Flyer

Thank you very much, I will give this a good read.