Hey fellow AFFs,
I suspect that there will be no better answer than "just keep looking" here but I will see if anyone has any tips.
I am looking at doing a 140K One World RTW award trip next year, hoping to start around 8 Feb 2014.
My first destination of choice is South America and Santiago although I wouldn't mind doing a <24 hour stopover in Auckland. This week the 8 Feb became within 353 days. It seems that the two hardest legs to get Award flights on are Aust / NZ to South America and South America to USA. Therefore I am happy to book these as soon as possible and wear the points / fees to change when adding the remaining flights to have the One World Award. Therefore I have been trying to book a flight this week to start my journey.
The last three days, Qantas have released just one business class seat on QF321 the LAN code share that goes through Auckland on all of the 8, 9, 10 Feb, but no economy seats and none on the direct flight which goes on Mon, Wed and Saturday. I have been looking at Expert Flyer and going onto QFF at 11am to try and book my seat straight away. There was a reward seat or two available on the 6th and 7th but they are gone now and I chose not to take them at the time, thinking I could get one on my preferred dates when they became available.
I also rang up QFF today and thought I might have a go at asking to get a seat released (as I expected they would only do it for Platinum, Plat One or CL) and had a chat to the lady and she couldn't offer much more than keep looking. She also checked that there had been no award bookings on those flights so it is not as if someone miraculously got in ahead of me.
Has anyone got any tips? Are they likely to go back and release awards for those dates? How likely are they to release an award for the next few days? I am keen to get one of these dates as I would like to start a tour from Buenos Airies on 14 Feb or potentially a similar tour from another company on 17 Feb.
Other option is of course to take the Business Class seat but I only have around 220K points (possibly could get it up by maybe American Express Platinum Bonus) but from my research J class seats are normally harder to get for the other flights than Y and I think I would rather have some points in the bank to go back to some of these places in the next few years.
Must say I am a bit disappointed, I thought QF would have at least some award seats for every flight, even if you had to get them the best part of a year out.
I suspect that there will be no better answer than "just keep looking" here but I will see if anyone has any tips.
I am looking at doing a 140K One World RTW award trip next year, hoping to start around 8 Feb 2014.
My first destination of choice is South America and Santiago although I wouldn't mind doing a <24 hour stopover in Auckland. This week the 8 Feb became within 353 days. It seems that the two hardest legs to get Award flights on are Aust / NZ to South America and South America to USA. Therefore I am happy to book these as soon as possible and wear the points / fees to change when adding the remaining flights to have the One World Award. Therefore I have been trying to book a flight this week to start my journey.
The last three days, Qantas have released just one business class seat on QF321 the LAN code share that goes through Auckland on all of the 8, 9, 10 Feb, but no economy seats and none on the direct flight which goes on Mon, Wed and Saturday. I have been looking at Expert Flyer and going onto QFF at 11am to try and book my seat straight away. There was a reward seat or two available on the 6th and 7th but they are gone now and I chose not to take them at the time, thinking I could get one on my preferred dates when they became available.
I also rang up QFF today and thought I might have a go at asking to get a seat released (as I expected they would only do it for Platinum, Plat One or CL) and had a chat to the lady and she couldn't offer much more than keep looking. She also checked that there had been no award bookings on those flights so it is not as if someone miraculously got in ahead of me.
Has anyone got any tips? Are they likely to go back and release awards for those dates? How likely are they to release an award for the next few days? I am keen to get one of these dates as I would like to start a tour from Buenos Airies on 14 Feb or potentially a similar tour from another company on 17 Feb.
Other option is of course to take the Business Class seat but I only have around 220K points (possibly could get it up by maybe American Express Platinum Bonus) but from my research J class seats are normally harder to get for the other flights than Y and I think I would rather have some points in the bank to go back to some of these places in the next few years.
Must say I am a bit disappointed, I thought QF would have at least some award seats for every flight, even if you had to get them the best part of a year out.
