Bronze Vs Silver - Classic Flight Rewards (Availability)

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gonecountry

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Hi Flyers :)

My husband will make the jump this month from bronze to silver.
We are looking at grabbing some PE or business reward seats with our points for a Sydney-Dallas flight next year. Having done this before (well Sydney-LA) as bronze does anyone know if availability gets any better with silver status?
It seems like last time that A380 flight is a tricky one to pin down reward wise.
 
Yes Silver will unlock more award availability (compared to Bronze). These are popular seats so ensure that you book well in advance.
 
Availability does improve with status. But I doubt silver will do much to change the level of availability for the flight you want. This is probably the most difficult award booking to make in my experience. I'd encourage you to start thinking about alternatives (such as CX via Hong Kong) without delay.
 
Gold would make a bigger difference and anything above that even more.

There are a lot of silvers (including many with Lifetime Silver status) and Golds (including many with Lifetime Gold status).

Lower status levels get what's left of QANTAS award seats after higher status travellers have had their pick. On popular routes there may be little/nothing left. QANTAS doesn't release seats for every day on every route and there may only be a couple of seats released when they do. The feeling out there is that the numbers of reward seats haven't increased to match the growth in numbers with status and hence they're becoming harder and harder to secure even for those with status.

If you can avoid school holidays and other peak times and are flexible enough to travel on an off-peak day of the week you'll stand a slightly better chance.

You may find you can only get seats on CX in at least one direction if not both as Dr Ralph mentioned.
 
Thanks everyone for the comments, very helpful.
I remember last time it was a real mission to get business seats and that was 12 months in advance! I ended up scoring flights for a Wednesday departure. It didn't matter I was just happy to have finally got some.

I wish there were search filters for the reward seats based on aircraft or it showed you availability more than a month at a time, why must it be so tedious!!
 
I want to be able to look at just Business and First seats on QF metal yet the search engine insists that I look for seats on partner airlines and in economy and at itineraries where some legs are in economy. It is tedious, but it is what it is.
 
I wish there were search filters for the reward seats based on aircraft or it showed you availability more than a month at a time, why must it be so tedious!!

I can almost guarantee you that this is intentional - the airlines don't want to make it too​ easy for you to redeem your points!
 
They only want you to spend up and accumulate them.

The upshot is that the harder they make it to redeem for classic awards, the more seats will be left for those that can be bothered finding them.
 
The upshot is that the harder they make it to redeem for classic awards, the more seats will be left for those that can be bothered finding them.

Or those prepared to take indirect routes.
 
I'm currently Bronze, Mrs Falcs is Silver, and my dad is gold so I've had a pretty decent experience comparing the difference in availability. There's a noticeable diff in each tier, but for premium cabins especially you really need gold for half decent availability...
 
I want to be able to look at just Business and First seats on QF metal yet the search engine insists that I look for seats on partner airlines and in economy and at itineraries where some legs are in economy. It is tedious, but it is what it is.

That happens particularly on routes where they have lots of partner airlines i.e. CX, JQ/3K etc.
 
Really though given reward seats can be hard to find on many routes, at least if partner flights are offered up that's got to be a plus for most punters looking to get from A to B. It's funny when our particular focus is so specific (eg: I may only want a F seat from MEL to LAX) but hey, maybe CX J/CX F via HKG is not quite so bad an option either. Sure, that little "Your flight from Hong Kong to Los Angeles will be in Economy" note is the big gotchya to watch out for when searching, but at least the system is going to show options even mostly undesireable ones, for city pairs.

Remember also, the majority of punters aren't looking for premium seats and would settle to spend their points on JQ to HNL as much as some of us wouldn't accept anything less than J suites SYD-HNL.

Everyone's different.

Anyway I agree with the general response to this query that the difference in availability at the Silver level over Bronze is going to be, in most cases, minimal. Gold is a definite step up. I don't even know that P1 offers a huge advantage over Gold (bar the presumed ability to request seats be opened, but that's a whole other issue)
 
I'm currently Bronze, Mrs Falcs is Silver, and my dad is gold so I've had a pretty decent experience comparing the difference in availability. There's a noticeable diff in each tier, but for premium cabins especially you really need gold for half decent availability...

I have dropped back to PS (Silver) for a period of 6 months after 5 years as SG (Gold) and have really noticed the difference in availability of premium seats :eek: with planned travel I should have that rectified by Xmas !!
 
Remember also, the majority of punters aren't looking for premium seats and would settle to spend their points on JQ to HNL as much as some of us wouldn't accept anything less than J suites SYD-HNL.

Everyone's different.

That's a great point. I am very much a novice in this big points game, and the only reason I started to question why was I using points for economy redemption's was over the last few years as airline competition has ramped up significantly and fare prices have therefore dropped a lot - you can usually get a return economy ticket with some airlines for not much more then some redemption costs of carriers!

But, there are still many many many people out there tat don't care. I have lots of friends that just slowly accumulate points and see them as a 'free' benefit of spending money anyhow, so they don't care even if they only get a minor benefit from redeeming them in economy as they were 'free' to begin with.
 
On another note, do different status' only provide benefits of more award seats with the carrier you hold status with? Or, does status also open up more seats with partner airline who also operate that similar route?
 
That's a great point. I am very much a novice in this big points game, and the only reason I started to question why was I using points for economy redemption's was over the last few years as airline competition has ramped up significantly and fare prices have therefore dropped a lot - you can usually get a return economy ticket with some airlines for not much more then some redemption costs of carriers!

But, there are still many many many people out there tat don't care. I have lots of friends that just slowly accumulate points and see them as a 'free' benefit of spending money anyhow, so they don't care even if they only get a minor benefit from redeeming them in economy as they were 'free' to begin with.

Exactly my point. Or is that points? :)

Consider Joesephine Average flyer, with or without family, flies rarely, maybe gets some points from shopping, CC's and the odd flight. Will never get status(and wouldn't know or care what a Status Credit was) and so on, but slowly pool up say 50k points and think yeah we'll use them to visit xyz in Darwin or something. Probably wouldn't even consider looking at J or anything. It's something they see as hey let's use them.. and there's nothing wrong with that at all. These are the sorts of people who the QF store (aka toasters and ipads) appeal to. I'm not in any way trying to put this segment of QFF members down in any way... it's just not reasonable to expect to get the points balances to significantly aim for your F reward to London or something for the vast majority of the membership (and thank goodness given there's enough of us in that pool already!). Some of these members are just as likely to have relatively small amounts of points expire and go unnoticed (or uncared about) too.

I have a good friend who, some years back when QF was at a rather low point, share price hovering around $1 and the talk was doom and gloom, who thought that's it, QF is doomed, I'm convering my 190k (something like that) points to woolies vouchers to at least use rather than lose. Now most of us would roll our eyes at that (I had a minor meltdown on her behalf when she told me what she'd done!) but you know what? she was happy with her choice.

I guess I'm trying to say that there are so many different perspectives and targets out there for people looking to use points... sure, the majority of the interested members of AFF are after those hard to find premium awards, upgrades etc - many of us have experience, play the points game, have status and expectations.. but the reality is in the Loyalty World, we're the small minority of the customer base. If Joe Avcerage can take the kids to Dreamworld on JQ during the school hols on points earned over 4 years that's a huge win for them and they're happy. So the system offering Y seats or combined rewards, or indirect routings may work out very well for some people, and not others - the real issue from my point of view is how CLEAR the provider (in this case QF) is about things like "Your flight from Sydney to Los Angeles will be in Econony" on a supposed ADL-LAX Business Class reward... we know to look and be careful.. some others might get caught out and that stuff annoys me. but that's an aside.

Not everyone has the same goals in the game of points....
 
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I know that many on here might have a very different opinion but I personally hardly ever have a serious problem getting rewards seats (even at the moment when I am only a lowly Gold but even less once I'm back at Platinum level). As a result, I find my QF points amazing value for either upgrading or getting premium seats via points outright. But I suspect there's a few reasons for this:
I do not mind avoiding busy times, if anything I rather try and avoid family holiday periods (also helps avoiding shreeking babies everywhere).
I also quite enjoy procrastinating by searching for different award options and different route options for hours if needs be as it makes me excited about the holidays.
I also don't mind mixing different airline partners and/or slightly exotic route options. For example, about a year ago when I moved back to Australia from Europe at very last moment (due to a job offer that came through), I managed to get rewards seats with a mix of BA and QF points going LHR-DXB in EK First, then onto Doha and further to SIN with QR and then after a little stop over there with QF down to Sydney in J. I quite enjoyed comparing all the different airlines :p
And finally- I am very diligent with collecting points, travel a fair bit both for pleasure and work and it all pays off, in the end.
 
It makes interesting reading, from Mel and Berlin re: using points everybody have their own ideas how to use their points. As for me most likely I will lose my gold status this year. Although some flights domestically and looking for a flight to Europe and yes preferable in PE or I/J Rewards or upgrades not much around in June /July. Gold or above is the best to have silver/bronze have very little value in my opinion. Thanks anyway and go back to my research how to spent my 110000 points hope that QF can make me happy.
 
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