How often does QANTAS release new award seats

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Kestrel

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Sep 15, 2004
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Hi

I'm trying to find two business class seats melb to Frankfurt return sometime from next March. It's possible at that time, themn almost impossible during April and May and then in late June a few appear again.

Just because I can't find any right now in April, does that mean there won't be any released later?

Cheers Kestrel
 
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Obviously Qantas do not publish such information. However, in my experience, and resulting from my own research and discussions with many QF FF members, I understand the situation to be as follows:

When the flight is initially loaded into the reservations system, a set number of FF award seats are made available in each class. These are the X (economy), U (business class) and Z (first class) fare buckets.

Once these seats have been reserved by FF members (either QF members for awards or upgrades, or partner airline FF members for awards), they are no longer available.

If one of these reserved seats is released due to a cancelation or change to the original reservee's itinerary, the seat will be released back into the original X, U or Z bucket and become available for someone else to reserve. Obviously this situation can occur at any time.

The first time QF seem to review the loading and decide if more seats should be released into the award buckets seems to be about 2-3 weeks before the flight date. This can be seen from people having upgrade waitlists clear at about this time.

Further reviews seems to occur at 1 week and 3 days and the day before flight date. Again, these are the times that upgrade awards seem to clear.

However, remember that upgrades come from the same class buckets as awards for U and Z inventory. So anyone with a confirmed and paid economy or business class ticket waitlisted for an upgrade will get first look at any X or Z inventory that is released. Only if there are still U and Z available will they be left for people wanting to book award flights.
 
Airline inventory management systems run continuously to maximise yield per seat. Cancelling a seat in U does not mean it will return to availability in that class. The systems are programmed to work from statistical, historical and other (special event etc) trends to give the airline the best return.

Requests for upgrades are weighted by status and award seats can become available from other seat 'buckets' by status also (eg T being used for FFPlat flyers where X is not available). However QF reviews this frequently.

The best way to get the result you want is to keep going back to the airline once a week until the last week or two and then every day or two at the end....
 
GDSman said:
Requests for upgrades are weighted by status and award seats can become available from other seat 'buckets' by status also (eg T being used for FFPlat flyers where X is not available).

T class is also used for Gold FF's, and will be used for Gold and Plat even if X class is available.

Dave
 
As far as I know, T class for awards for Plat and Gold status members is the only exception. There are no alternates to U and Z for Plat and Gold status members.
 
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