Questions and Answers

I was planning a trip to Australia in February 2021 and was going to use my advantage miles to fly the new the new Quantas route from ORD to BNE. Obviously the trip may not happen now, but I can’t seem to find any flights that used show how many miles to travel. Do you know if American/Quantas pulled all the reward seats that were recently available for that route?

Well, first of all finding premium cabin award seats to Australia, regardless of carrier or miles used, is often difficult. Second, Qantas makes award seats available about 360 days in advance. AA’s calendar – even for partners – opens 330 days in advance. So there’s a period of about 30 days where people booking those seats using Qantas miles or BA Avios (and perhaps some other currencies) can book those seats before they even appear on the AA award calendar. The best way to look for award space is to sign up for the Qantas and/or BA frequent flyer programs (for free) and use their searches to look for space. If you don’t see it there, it’s not available. Qantas’ calendar is handy in that it will allow you to search a month at a time and you can narrow the search to weed out economy seats. Searching on BA will confirm the seat is available to oneworld partners and should show up on the AA calendar. If you see one on BA that doesn’t show up on AA, you can call AA and they can usually see it. I had that happen when I was searching for space just over a year ago.

It seems you are aware that the route launch was obviously delayed til mid-September, so maybe in anticipation of a further delay, not much inventory has been loaded to minimize the number of passengers who would need to be rebooked.

[URL]https://www.qantasnewsroom.com.au/media-releases/qantas-group-update-on-coronavirus-response/[/URL]