On Sunday, Qantas issued an apology to frequent flyers for the airline’s recent operational issues and offered a range of gifts as a peace offering. One of the promises made was that Qantas would release more Classic Flight Reward seats, with the first tranche of additional award availability to be released from 12pm today.
On this, there’s been good news and bad news.
The good news is that Qantas has indeed released some more award availability, for travel up to 30 June 2023. This includes additional Economy reward seats on domestic and trans-Tasman flights, as well as seats in Economy, Premium Economy, Business and First Class on selected international long-haul routes.
We’ve been keeping a close eye on Qantas award availability in recent weeks, and there are now some Classic Flight Reward seats available on Qantas flights that were not before. Some examples have been posted on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum. These include Business Class reward seats from Melbourne-Los Angeles, London-Sydney and Perth-Johannesburg. There is also now a very limited amount of First Class award availability on routes such as Sydney-Los Angeles which was not previously showing.
The bad news is that nobody was able to log into the Qantas website or app between around 10am and 4pm today. Qantas Frequent Flyer members could still search for some flights without logging in, but were not actually able to book them for almost four hours after the seats were released!
Attempting to log into the Qantas website for a large part of Monday resulted in an error message that said “We are unable to process this request currently. Please try again later.”
Some Qantas Frequent Flyer members were even locked out of their accounts after too many failed login attempts!
The Qantas call centre was also unable to recognise frequent flyer membership numbers for an extended period. When calling Qantas at 2pm on Monday, the following recorded message was played:
Our frequent flyer authentication system is currently offline, and we are working to resolve the issue quickly. You won’t be able to log in online or via our contact centre at the moment. You can continue to the main menu or call again later.
Callers were also told:
If you are not travelling within the next 24 hours, please call back later as we attend to those with urgent travel needs.
Despite this, some AFF members say they were successful in booking over the phone during the afternoon. Others were able to book flights once the website issues were resolved, although some members missed out on their preferred flights because they were already gone by the time the website came fully back online.
Qantas surely had good intentions with the promise to release more Classic Flight Reward seats, and the website malfunction was finally resolved late on Monday. But the implementation has reminded many frustrated frequent flyers of why Qantas needed to apologise in the first place!
Join the discussion on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum: Qantas website down?
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