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.

 

[equus]

As far as getting better value for the points, would it be worth trying for class upgrades or some other option?

Value for points is in the eye of the beholder. It really comes down to what you would be willing to pay cash for, and instead can use points. It is all very well to say that a point is worth 8 cents or more if used for a business or first fare because they would cost $10,000+, but if you would not pay that amount, then the points are not really worth that much. They are worth what they can save you.

There are a lot of permutations on value when you start to think about redeeming - especially for a party as large as yours, and assuming a mix of status (at least 2 WP, but presumably those without status as well). You may be able to get some classic rewards opened up, and that would be the lowest points cost, but whoever flies on them will earn no points or status (unless someone has Points Club as well, which if you have ~2M points, is quite possible).. It is unlikely that you would get 9 seats opened up. Classic Plus rewards then become an option - more available, and work out at roughly 1c per point - so makes your points worth more. These are still rewards, so come with the lack of earn, and you are restricted to the QF flights - so not a great number of European destinations.

Points plus pay may only come in at around 0.7 cents per point, but these are revenue fares, so will earn some points back. More importantly, you can redeem on anything you can book via Qantas - so all the Emirates codeshares open up many more destinations (though you pay more than booking the Emirates flights).

If you have found flight options with a total cost of $25K, and these are on QF flights, then you should be able to get more value for your points than just $12K if you look at either a request to open some rewards on those flights, or use Classic Plus rewards. Just beware, that a successful rewards release may reduce the number of cheapest fare bucket seats remaining, so unless you have all the seats at the same lowest cost, your average cost per seat remaining may go up.

 

[Seat0B]

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?

Just on the practicalities of this, you simply call QF and ask for the seats to be released. It's always a good idea to have some potential dates and flight numbers in mind. I think you can usually try three different days/flights per phone call, and I think they limit the calls to one call per day. So you and your wife could each check out three options each day. If there is a black out period, then you won't succeed.

The suggestion to look for reward flights from somewhere in Asia to Europe is a good one, as these are often more plentiful. Then you can either pay for connections to the Asian departure point, or look for more reward flights between Aus-Asia. However, as @equus said, the risk here is that if one of these flights is delayed, your connections are not protected as they would be on 2 separate bookings. Hence most people on here advise taking an overnight stop between the flights to minimise that risk. Even though that might seem a bit of a palaver with small children, breaking up the flight and the jet lag can actually be quite a help in keeping everyone sane when travelling as a family, in my experience. You can usually get something affordable at/near the airport, and there is usually a swimming pool etc for keeping the kids entertained.