What the New Qantas Flight Reward Finder Can (And Can’t) Do

Qantas has launched a new Flight Reward Finder tool, promising to make it much easier for frequent flyers to find those elusive international Classic Reward seats.

To find international reward flights on the Qantas website, you no longer need to search one route and date at a time. Instead, you can use the Flight Reward Finder to easily see an overview of availability to an entire region, across all cabin classes, over the upcoming year!

Qantas has developed the tool in partnership with Gyoza Flights, which provides a very similar reward flight search tool as a paid service. Gyoza Flights is one of many next-generation reward flight search tools to have launched this decade, alongside the likes of Point.me or Seats.aero.

While the Flight Reward Finder is a welcome addition to help Qantas Frequent Flyer members find Classic Rewards, it still has some limitations. Let’s take a closer look at what it can and can’t do…

What you can do with the Qantas Flight Reward Finder

The Qantas Flight Reward Finder definitely has some neat features which make it easier to find international reward seats on Qantas and its many partner airlines.

Your search criteria can be as broad or narrow as you like. For example, you could search for flights to and from specific airports. Or, you could search for all available flights between whole regions – such as Australia to Europe. You can select and unselect specific airports within those regions, search for flights to multiple regions at the same time, or even just search for flights to “anywhere”.

Other features include:

• Search for seats on a specific date, within a custom date range, or simply view all the options available over the next year
• See a month-by-month overview of availability by cabin class, by selecting “Travel date” and viewing the pop-up calendar
• Filter the options by number of stops
• Filter by cabin class
• Sort the results based on cabin, departure date, total trip duration or other options
• See the number of points and taxes/carrier charges required for each option
• Search for a specific number of seats

The ability to select the number of seats you need (up to five) is a feature that isn’t offered by that many of the third-party reward search tools, so that’s quite neat.

For example, these are some of the results if I search for two seats from Australia to Europe, UK & Ireland in August, and sort by Business Class:

What the Flight Reward Finder doesn’t do

The Qantas Flight Reward Finder does have some limitations. For example, it’s not designed to:

• Show domestic flight availability
• Show flights between every single possible city pair (it only shows flights between airports built into the tool)
• Show Classic Plus seats (I’m sure many AFF members will be happy about this!)
• Allow bookings within the tool
• Show reward flight options that do not already appear on Qantas.com to someone who is not logged in

There are also a few features that AFF members have noticed are missing, such as:

• The ability to filter results by airline (e.g. to exclude Jetstar or Emirates)
• The ability to filter results by transit airport

It’s worth noting that the results shown are cached, and are generally only updated every few hours. Therefore, it’s possible that a flight you can see in the Flight Reward Finder is no longer available because someone else already booked it.

However, if you see an option that you like, you can click on it to view the full itinerary details. A “check availability” button will also appear, allowing you to confirm that the seats are still available in real-time.

Does this make it too easy to find Qantas reward flight availability?

For as long as I can remember, Qantas Frequent Flyer members have complained that it’s hard to find desirable Classic Reward seats. Sure, there may be plenty of Economy seats to places that people don’t want to fly, at times they don’t want to fly there. But finding premium cabin availability on busy routes can be tough.

Over recent years, Qantas has taken steps to address these concerns. The introduction of Classic Plus was one way it tried to do this. It’s also been trying to get more reward seats online with partner airlines.

By introducing the Flight Reward Finder, Qantas is hoping to highlight the large amount Classic Rewards that do exist. And there’s no doubt that this tool makes it easier to find those more sought-after seats.

Some people believe that if Qantas makes it too easy for people to find seats, it’ll lead to an even further reduction in seats that are actually available (as more people snap them up). As one AFF member commented on our forum:

Hmmm not sure I like the democratisation of this information. Now the unsavvy points whales will be able to hoover up all the award seats with relative ease.

muppet on the AFF forum

This is possible, but I personally wouldn’t worry too much about that. There are already plenty of third-party tools out there that can easily find Qantas reward availability. Admittedly, most of those do require a subscription purchase, so more people will now have access to this information for free. Still, that’s not the main reason I think people don’t need to worry…

The tool only shows what appears on one-way searches on Qantas.com

Savvy points collectors know that if you simply search for one-way Premium Economy or Business Class reward flights to London on Qantas.com, you’re unlikely to find much.

Sure, if you’re lucky, the website might show you seats on direct or one-stop itineraries on Qantas, British Airways, Emirates or Cathay Pacific. But often, you need to get creative with the multi-city tool.

For example, there might actually be availability on Jetstar or Finnair from Melbourne to Bangkok, with an onward connection to Europe available on a partner airline like British Airways, Air France, KLM, Oman Air or Royal Jordanian. But you would only see this if you used Qantas’ multi-city booking tool, breaking up your search into Melbourne-Bangkok and Bangkok-London as separate flights.

For example, I just found this perfectly acceptable Premium Economy itinerary from Melbourne to London via Bangkok, using the Qantas multi-city search:

But the new reward search tool doesn’t know this option exists. It doesn’t appear when you search for a one-way flight from Melbourne to London on the main Qantas website, so the tool doesn’t show it either.

That said, you could use the new tool to more easily search for seats from Australia to Asia, and separately from Asia to Europe. If you find flights that connect up, you could then try booking them using the multi-city tool.

The Qantas multi-city tool is still your friend

It’s important to note that the new tool does not replace the popular multi-city booking engine. The multi-city booking tool is still there, and in some cases you’ll still have to use it. While the multi-city booking tool certainly has its bugs and quirks, my understanding is that Qantas plans to improve that as well in due course.

Also keep in mind that the Qantas website does not show reward seats from all points of origin. For example, you cannot search or book reward flights originating from countries such as Sri Lanka, Qatar, Malta, most of Africa or most of South America on the Qantas website. Therefore, the Flight Reward Finder won’t see any availability that might exist from those countries either.

I believe Qantas is working to add the ability to search and book online from more countries, but this is a manual process that takes time.

The upshot – for better or worse – is that there will still be more Classic Reward options available to those who put the time and effort into understanding these quirks.

Qantas status still gets you access to extra availability

Another key thing to remember about the Qantas Flight Reward Finder is that it only shows seats that would be available to a Bronze frequent flyer. The tool does not give you the option to log into your Qantas Frequent Flyer account, so it won’t show extra Classic Rewards that might be available to you if you have Qantas status.

While this isn’t the case on all routes, Qantas does sometimes give earlier access to premium cabin reward seats to logged-in Platinum One, Platinum, Gold or Silver frequent flyers.

In addition, if you have Qantas Platinum or Platinum One status, you have the added option of calling Qantas to request a Classic Reward seat release.

My overall thoughts

The Flight Reward Finder is a useful addition to the Qantas Frequent Flyer toolkit. It’s great if you want to efficiently search for point-to-point reward flights, and I’m sure it will help many people to find seats they might have otherwise overlooked.

Still, the Qantas Flight Reward Finder is not the be-all and end-all for finding availability. It just makes it easier to find flights that you could already see on Qantas.com.

The tool can’t piece together more complex multi-city itineraries. So, you might still need to use the multi-city booking tool or call Qantas to search for seats, and paid services like Frequent Flyer Concierge could still be useful in some cases.

I do wonder if this tool will lead to the demise of some of the third-party tools out there that currently scrape Qantas award availability. Since Qantas now offers you a free tool that does similar things, I suspect many people will cancel their subscriptions to third-party options – unless they offer extra features that Qantas does not.

One tool that might still have a solid edge for finding Qantas availability is Flightseats.io, as it claims to be able to stitch together separate reward bookings to create multi-city itineraries that aren’t otherwise easy to find. Tools like Seats.aero that do many more things than just finding Qantas award availability will also remain valuable.

Launching such a tool isn’t risk-free for Qantas

For Qantas, there is a risk that this new tool could inadvertently expose just how few premium cabin reward seats are actually available on key Qantas international routes.

It does make it easier to find seats that do exist, and I appreciate the transparency. At the same time, it just took me 10 seconds to discover that Qantas only has one flight from Sydney to Johannesburg within the next year with Premium Economy or Business reward availability. Or that there isn’t currently a single Classic Reward available on Qantas’ direct flight from Perth to Paris in any premium cabin.

Since Classic Reward availability is now so transparent, Qantas might need to back up the launch of this tool by actually releasing more seats on its own flights. 😉

Have you tried the Flight Reward Finder yet? What do you think of it?