The qantas award search engine is a joke.

[neon_crossing]

Why show me availablity in business/first class if EVERY flight has a little 'i' asterisk advising me most of the sectors are in economy.

Getting really frustrated looking for oneworld availability!

Should I shell out and pay for a third party system? What do you guys recommend?

 

[anat0l]

If your flight you are looking for is on QF, AA, AY, BA or IB, use the AA website. You don't even have to sign up for an AAdvantage account to use it, and you get a calendar view (more versatile than the QF one).

For other oneworld carriers, use the BA website, but you will need to sign up for an Executive Club account.

See this: http://www.australianfrequentflyer....search-oneworld-award-availability-59412.html

This thread, in a sense, should be really more located in the QFF section because it is not just a problem for searching generally for oneworld availability (although the "short J long Y" problem is generally contained on QF/JQ flight options).

I have a funny feeling that some of those "bogus" options are actually valid published fares, which is why they turn up (though funny enough, it would seem QF wouldn't have the balls to sell them for cash). This has been a persistent problem throughout almost all versions of award booking engines - maybe the tech crew have no idea how to filter them? (Seems odd). I'm sure many of us would be OK with the short being in Y and the long in J (or F).

For the tech heads here, how would you code in a 'filter condition' to remove these bogus options? I'm thinking either:

• Have the option at the calendar screen to only show availability where non-stop / direct (i.e. absolutely no stopovers) options exist. Click that option, refresh the page, the calendar redisplays. This would be an easy filter to code.
• Have the option at the calendar screen to only show availability where all flights are on the same class of service. This backfires slightly in some cases; for example, if you are searching for F options from CBR to LHR and click this option, obviously you won't get any availability at all. Again, I'd imagine this is an easy filter to code, as you would just compare the class codes of each flight of an option and see if they are all the same.
• Code the following filter: if sum(flight duration in higher class) > (sum flight duration in lower class) then display option else suppress option. This would technically be the most difficult filter to code up because you would need to query each flight, get its flight duration, then run two summations and compare them.