Despite the best of intentions, with a swag of Krisflyer points expiring as of 31.12.23 - last night at 9.40pm the redemption dance began. Ideal outcome would have been SYD CDG J return in mid Oct to early Nov.
Relying on memory is not as reliable as historically unfortunately. We needed more points than we had expiring for 2 x J returns. Found several date pairs that had both the lower cost award tickets available. So just needed a few more points to be transferred across.
Logged onto VFF at about 9.55pm and transferred the minimum number of VFF points required (to the nearest thousand) and the obligatory confirmation message appeared after a 50 second seeming processing freeze (nothing being downloaded from internet/buffering). Blood pressure rose accordingly and then the confirmation message appeared - '... take between 24 to 48 hours to appear'.
The optimist in me thought lovingly of all the posts up thread about transfer happening within minutes, and ignorred the pessimist pointing out that there may well be a few thousand (or more) other people trying to do redemptions before 31.12.23 disappeared.
By 10.25 the points had arrived, and so seemingly had many more people trying to process point saving redemptions. 4 or 5 times the redemption process failed and came up with a 'site maintenance' message and 'contact your local office during business hours'. The SIA system was much slower than the pre-10pm experience.
Just after 11pm success, but with a bitter twist. A message appeared at the top of the screen reminding us that we could have one free stopover. Of course the boss said we should on the way across.
Next attempt, failure.
Next attempt, using a previous search link instead of inputting the data again & it worked. Added the stopover, got a better flight into CDG as a result and everything processed perfectly.
11.25pm email confirmation arrived.
All of a sudden 2024 is looking much better than it had been...