Roman Sandstorm
Newbie
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2018
- Posts
- 3
Warning: Long read. Feel free to bypass.
Further sharing my experience of booking a OneWorld Classic Flight Reward. I have spent 60-80 hours on this, and a few 3:30 am finishes so even if it helps one person, just a little, I'll feel better.
My requirements were tough, although definitely made easier by being one person.
Dec-Jan this year. MEL-Europe (pref HEL). Europe-Japan. Japan-MEL. Pref J class.
I read as much advice in this forum (but not 857 pages) as I could. Other forums. Reddit. And the (mostly) good articles on the scheme here and elsewhere. But those articles do present a rather rosy and simplistic version of reality.
I subscribed to seats.aero after one day. $12.99 for a month saved way more than that overall.
Very, very few J award seats out of Aust in Dec. Very few Y class, for that matter. Seats.aero shows quite a lot of MEL-DPS (my preference) in early-mid Dec, however this is not reflected when using the Qantas multi-city tool.
It seems that seats.areo includes Classic Plus reward seats, and this can't be filtered out. A pain. But this only seems to matter for flights from Aust. Once starting elsewhere, the dual-filter of QFF and OneWorld seems way more accurate.
As finding Aust-DPS seemed almost impossible I figured to *start* from DPS, perhaps getting a $500 Jetstar there independently.
So I put together DPS-HKG-NRT-HEL-HND-MNL-MEL. Took into account all the stopover/surface sector considerations. Plugged into Q multi-city tool. And all accepted. Went to payment, and *bzzzt*. No matter what combination I tried, even splitting CX/AY, JL/AY codeshares, etc into individual flights, I could not progress beyond to payment; even though the tool accepted the routes and conditions.
I tried starting from HKG, MNL, anywhere. I reduced to two or three flights, and it was accepted and went to payment page. But having any return from Europe broke it.
And at this point I noticed something really weird. If at any time I actually progressed to the payment page, and then obviously cancelled, when I returned to selecting (after Qantas's terrible error page and need to restart the multi tool), often the J class seats that were available five minutes earlier were no longer available. (Yes, cleared cookies, new browser, logged off and on.) Yet, returning the next day they were back again.
I know there have been comments in this forum that progressing to the payment page does not impact on availability, and perhaps this is indeed correct, but I experienced those symptoms many times, over several days. And I don't believe that reward seats on obscure routes suddenly disappeared one day (at the time I was looking) and then re-appeared the next day on same routes in same quantity. Maybe I didn't clear or delete something I should have? I can accept it must be me, not you.
This hugely frustrated and upset me until I realised that the seats returned soon after. Because I had spent dozens of hours, and was then faced with starting the whole thing again.
After reading all of the horror stories of dealing with the call centres on here, I really wanted to resolve this myself, and only deal with a call centre if I was to change at a later time.
Ultimately, even though the routes and seats 'passed' the multi-tool, I could never get the whole six slots to work. Until... I started leg one in Australia.
Once I put MEL-DPS as the first (and I picked an arbitrary date a couple of months earlier where there were rewards (not Plus) seats), the rest of the itinerary fell into place. After all the faffing about I had lost HKG-NRT-HEL, but managed to find an HKG-ICN-HEL instead. No biggie.
It accepted, went through to payment, and... zap! My 318,000 points gone, and $760 fees. BTW, pricing the legs one at a time, using local currency and converting, it all added up to over $1200, so starting in Aust, bizarrely, was much less. Go figure.
So now, I have alerts for any kind of Classic Rewards seat from MEL-DPS in mid Dec, and I will brave the call centre, and front up the $77 when the time comes to change the booking. At that time I also plan to add two legs inside Europe (as I have surface sectors available and unused). But this is a nice 'plus', not essential.
My biggest concern remains if no award seats ever appear leading up to mid-December! What do I do then? How does my original idea of just buying a cheap seat to Bali fit in with the rest of the plan? Will advance notice of a no-show keep the remainder of the itinerary intact?
Overall... whew... what a complex procedure. And I haven't had 40 calls to the call centre like some people on here. Luckily, I don't have family or other demands, and can spare some 3:00 am finishes. LOL. This must be a nightmare for some folks, and they must question whether the saving is worthwhile.
Sorry for the essay-length read. But I feel I have addressed some things in here that are either barely mentioned, or spread over 100's of posts. Fellow sufferers, you are not alone.
Further sharing my experience of booking a OneWorld Classic Flight Reward. I have spent 60-80 hours on this, and a few 3:30 am finishes so even if it helps one person, just a little, I'll feel better.
My requirements were tough, although definitely made easier by being one person.
Dec-Jan this year. MEL-Europe (pref HEL). Europe-Japan. Japan-MEL. Pref J class.
I read as much advice in this forum (but not 857 pages) as I could. Other forums. Reddit. And the (mostly) good articles on the scheme here and elsewhere. But those articles do present a rather rosy and simplistic version of reality.
I subscribed to seats.aero after one day. $12.99 for a month saved way more than that overall.
Very, very few J award seats out of Aust in Dec. Very few Y class, for that matter. Seats.aero shows quite a lot of MEL-DPS (my preference) in early-mid Dec, however this is not reflected when using the Qantas multi-city tool.
It seems that seats.areo includes Classic Plus reward seats, and this can't be filtered out. A pain. But this only seems to matter for flights from Aust. Once starting elsewhere, the dual-filter of QFF and OneWorld seems way more accurate.
As finding Aust-DPS seemed almost impossible I figured to *start* from DPS, perhaps getting a $500 Jetstar there independently.
So I put together DPS-HKG-NRT-HEL-HND-MNL-MEL. Took into account all the stopover/surface sector considerations. Plugged into Q multi-city tool. And all accepted. Went to payment, and *bzzzt*. No matter what combination I tried, even splitting CX/AY, JL/AY codeshares, etc into individual flights, I could not progress beyond to payment; even though the tool accepted the routes and conditions.
I tried starting from HKG, MNL, anywhere. I reduced to two or three flights, and it was accepted and went to payment page. But having any return from Europe broke it.
And at this point I noticed something really weird. If at any time I actually progressed to the payment page, and then obviously cancelled, when I returned to selecting (after Qantas's terrible error page and need to restart the multi tool), often the J class seats that were available five minutes earlier were no longer available. (Yes, cleared cookies, new browser, logged off and on.) Yet, returning the next day they were back again.
I know there have been comments in this forum that progressing to the payment page does not impact on availability, and perhaps this is indeed correct, but I experienced those symptoms many times, over several days. And I don't believe that reward seats on obscure routes suddenly disappeared one day (at the time I was looking) and then re-appeared the next day on same routes in same quantity. Maybe I didn't clear or delete something I should have? I can accept it must be me, not you.
This hugely frustrated and upset me until I realised that the seats returned soon after. Because I had spent dozens of hours, and was then faced with starting the whole thing again.
After reading all of the horror stories of dealing with the call centres on here, I really wanted to resolve this myself, and only deal with a call centre if I was to change at a later time.
Ultimately, even though the routes and seats 'passed' the multi-tool, I could never get the whole six slots to work. Until... I started leg one in Australia.
Once I put MEL-DPS as the first (and I picked an arbitrary date a couple of months earlier where there were rewards (not Plus) seats), the rest of the itinerary fell into place. After all the faffing about I had lost HKG-NRT-HEL, but managed to find an HKG-ICN-HEL instead. No biggie.
It accepted, went through to payment, and... zap! My 318,000 points gone, and $760 fees. BTW, pricing the legs one at a time, using local currency and converting, it all added up to over $1200, so starting in Aust, bizarrely, was much less. Go figure.
So now, I have alerts for any kind of Classic Rewards seat from MEL-DPS in mid Dec, and I will brave the call centre, and front up the $77 when the time comes to change the booking. At that time I also plan to add two legs inside Europe (as I have surface sectors available and unused). But this is a nice 'plus', not essential.
My biggest concern remains if no award seats ever appear leading up to mid-December! What do I do then? How does my original idea of just buying a cheap seat to Bali fit in with the rest of the plan? Will advance notice of a no-show keep the remainder of the itinerary intact?
Overall... whew... what a complex procedure. And I haven't had 40 calls to the call centre like some people on here. Luckily, I don't have family or other demands, and can spare some 3:00 am finishes. LOL. This must be a nightmare for some folks, and they must question whether the saving is worthwhile.
Sorry for the essay-length read. But I feel I have addressed some things in here that are either barely mentioned, or spread over 100's of posts. Fellow sufferers, you are not alone.
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