Qantas Points (Part two)

Hola and welcome to The Summit, my weekly newsletter where I share my unfiltered thoughts on navigating the peaks and valleys of adulthood. From health and relationships to productivity and purpose, consider this newsletter a collection of naive wisdom from a 20-something year old summiting the mountain of life.

Today: Qantas Points Part 2 - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

If you haven’t already read my first article, introducing the Wonderful World of Qantas Points & Credit Card Churning, I would start there first! Because today, I am assuming you are familiar with this wonderful world and will be diving deeper into the nitty gritty of my experience actually booking flights with Qantas Points (once you get them) - the good, the bad and the ugly.

If you aren’t that interested in Qantas Points, this article probably won’t be relevant to you, but if you are interested, specifically if you are planning on using points to fly AROUND THE WORLD, consider this everything you need to know, and what I wish I knew, before getting started 🙄.

To summarise my experience, I believe the actual booking process was what made me realise that sometimes things are too good to be true! Up until this point, everything I read online had made the booking process sound like a piece of cake: find your flights, lock ‘em in, Bob’s your uncle. But in truth, it took me hours, days, and even weeks to finalise everything.

For context, my girlfriend and I decided we would use our points towards two ‘Around the World Tickets’, stopping in five countries over the course of 6 months. I thought it would be pretty easy, considering we knew exactly where we wanted to go and were totally flexible on dates but, we quickly fell victim towards Qantas’ very average booking tool, phone staff and limited seat availability.

So, to keep this simple, here are four things you should be aware of/do when trying to book your ‘Around the World Ticket’.

1) Be an expert on the deal - it is not actually an ‘Around the World Ticket’

The first major hiccup I had when booking, was calling up Qantas and asking them how I book an ‘Around the World Ticket’… they had no idea what I was talking about and sent me on a wild goose chase saying that I had to book through Oneworld. This is because, the deal I have been referring to when I say you can fly around the world, is actually just a return multi-city Qantas booking, as per the Oneworld Classic Flight Rewards Table (the bottom table here).

This is DIFFERENT from Oneworld’s Round the World ticket (RTW). It can be quite confusing, but it simple terms, Oneworld’s RTW ticket costs $$$ and is booked through the Oneworld website, whereas the Qantas’ Oneworld Classic Flight Rewards deal, is paid with points and through the Qantas website.

It is important to know that these are not the same because they have slightly different rules. For example, Oneworld’s RTW ticket only allows travel in one general direction around the world (east or west), whereas Qantas’ ticket does not have this restriction (it took me a long time to realise this 🙄).

My advice is to read up on the terms and conditions of Qantas’ Oneworld Classic Flight Rewards Table yourself, but here is a quick summary of the conditions:

• Must travel using only Oneworld Member Airlines and use at least two different airlines across the booking

• Up to five free stopovers are permitted / more than five stopovers are not permitted.

• Itinerary must contain no more than 16 segments.

• Only one stopover is permitted in any one city in the Itinerary.

• Only two transfers may be taken at any one city in the Itinerary.

• A city is considered transfer if you are there for less than 24 hours.

• The totally air mileage of the flights must not exceed 35,000 miles.

• All travel must be completed within 12 months of first departure.

2) The online booking tool is average, but you need to use it either way.

As mentioned, you should be making your booking through the Qantas multi-city booking tool. Here are all of things I learnt in my experience:

• The website only allows a maximum of six segments. For simple itineraries this shouldn’t be a problem, considering you can only have a maximum of five stopovers anyway. However, when building complex itineraries with multiple layovers, you will need to make the booking over the phone. The solution I found was to work with a few legs at a time, write all the details down and call up Qantas when you are ready to book.

• You need to know which airlines are in the Oneworld Alliance! Because Qantas also has many partner airlines that are not a part of Oneworld, the website may show you flight options that are not permitted (as part of the Oneworld Classic Flight Rewards deal). As an example below, the first option would not be permitted because it uses WestJet (not a Oneworld Airline), whereas the second option using Alaskan Airlines (Oneworld Airline) would be fine.

• The most effective method to find flights is to work with one segment at a time. If you add all of your segments to the multi-city booking tool and receive an error message, you will not know which leg doesn’t work. I find it similar to coding 🤓.

• The error messages are extremely unhelpful. When you search for flights, you may get an error message and you will not know if it is the website crashing, if there are limited reward seats or if there are just no partner airlines that fly to that destination (generally there just aren't any reward seats left). Thankfully, Australian Frequent Flyer have an article detailing all the error codes. Also, I’ll add that I found it very helpful using Flight Connections, to see where each airline flies!

• Points cap at 132,000 if you have done everything right. When using the multi-city tool, you are prompted to select one segment at a time, and there is a running total (in points). The first few segments are priced as if they are standalone flights, but if you have done everything correctly, the total will not exceed 132,000 points, as per the reward table. That means, that if you have 6 segments, the first three might add up quickly to 132,000 points, but as you add on the last few segments, the price will not change, the moment it does, you have done something wrong (not met one of the requirements).

3) What to expect when calling Qantas

As stated, if your itinerary is more than 6 legs you will need to make your booking over the phone, and this is what I found in my experience:

• The call centre training is inconsistent. The staff often don’t know the deal as well as you do and may tell you false information (which is just to the best of their knowledge). If they don’t feel very helpful, ask to speak to their manager or just call back. I did that a few times and it made a world of difference. Read more on this here.

• You often don’t even need to tell them that you are trying to book the Oneworld Classic Flight Rewards, you can just ask them to price a multi-city booking for you - provided you’ve done all the hard work of finding the correct flights yourself. If you did everything right, the price should come out to be exactly what is stated in the reward table.

• They may try and charge you a booking fee ($75 per person) but don’t let them! Usually, when people make bookings over the phone, they charge this fee because they could have just done it themselves on the website. However, if the Qantas website is incapable of handling complex itineraries, that’s not your fault - and if you tell them that, they shouldn’t charge you 😎.

4) Tips and tricks

• There are so many ways to get your itinerary to work, so make sure to think outside of the box and not just give up if your first option isn’t available. You can try different dates, nearby airports or even look at staying one night somewhere (less than 24hrs so therefore a layover) on the way to your main destination. For example, we couldn’t find flights from Canada to Vietnam, but we did manage to find flights from Canada to Japan, accommodation for one night, and then flights from Japan to Vietnam the next day!

• You can use surface segments. This is when you fly into one airport, then make your own arrangements to another and fly from there the next time. For example, we could find reward seating all the way to Canada, so we flew to LAX, bought our own flight separately to Canada, and booked our next leg flying out of Canada. This is also only considered as one stopover.

• You can make use this deal to make two holidays over a 12-month period. This can be tricky and would really be gaming the system. I would recommend reading more about this here.

• If you can’t get where you want, go as close as you can. For example, we wanted to go to Nepal but there was no seating availability. So, we flew to Delhi (which is only an hour flight away) and booked our own separate flights from there.

Extra Details:

• When you save over 150,000 points, you technically join Qantas Points Club. Usually, I wouldn’t really care about this, but it came with a $50 wine voucher! So, a few days later, I had three bottles of wine at my doorstep - W.

• I was quite dissatisfied with the whole booking process, so I filed a complaint, and they gave me 5000 points to compensate. I am not suggesting you do this, but thought it was worth mentioning 😏, especially if you have a similar experience (but hopefully you don’t because you read this).

• Finally, for anyone interested, I thought I would share exactly how I accrued all of my points (note some of the credit card deals have now changed). It is also worth noting, that once I received my points from my NAB card, I cancelled it and applied for the Westpac card.

If you enjoyed this article, please feel free to share it with a friend who might also enjoy it; and if you’re the friend, feel free to subscribe here 🙃!

_{Like always, if you have any feedback, you can respond to this email! I’d love to hear what you think :)}