[Princess]

So my husband & I are both plat QFF with over 300 000 points each (no children).

We want to book a business class ATW trip soon (280 000 points each), but cant seem to ever be able to find any available (business) seats.

We have now resigned ourselves to having to book *EVERY SINGLE LEG* separately. Which I know will cost us more points, but we can live with that.

I also know they make the seats available 355 days in advance, but it still seems I cant get the seat I want.... so at what time (exactly) do the seats become available?? I dont care what time of the day or night I need to book to make it happen...

Or do you think it would be better to book the entire thing over the phone (I dont care it will cost even more points, we have enough), just to make it happen?

For the record, we are flexible about the times of the flights and when we go.

An itinerary we are considering is Syd-Vancouver-Las Vegas-New York-Prague-London-Hong Kong-Syd.

Also we cant ever find any (even economy) flights on some of the US internal flights - so are we going to have to pay for those ones?

Thanks for your input.

Princess.

[NM]

Note that it is only Qantas seats that are available to you at 355 days. Other airlines do not load their availability for QF awards until various times after that.

[dajop]

The main thing is to try to be flexible with the routing, and look at alternatives, eg instead of flying London-Hongkong, look at perhaps Hongkong-Helsinki-London, or Hongkong-Dubai-London, Hongkong-Delhi-London etc. It may be well worthwhile spending the extra 2,500 pts to book over the phone as they will be able to check these quicker than you can online.

When my partner & I booked at J class RTW in 2005 (for travel last year), we had problems with 3 sectors. First of all Asia-Europe, but HKG-Dubai-London solved that problem originally (although SYD-FRA became available and we took that instead - we wanted to end up in Amsterdam so 4 hours on the train to get there wasn't too bad. Then London-Rio no good on direct service, so tried Madrid-Rio to no avail, but curiously plenty of awards Barcelona-Rio (which is where the Madrid-Rio flight actually originated), and managed to squeeze in 23 hrs in Barcelona (one of my favourite cities), as a result (would have liked longer, but stopover restrictions prevented that). Thirdly was South America-Australia, which was impossible to find any inventory on the LAN flights from Santiago. However routing via LAX was fine , and that's what we did and this worked out well, as for once actually had time to leave the airport and see some of LA rather than just the airport.

[straitman]

Remember as Platinum, that for QF legs such as LAX - SYD (or MEL) you can ask for extra award seats to be made available.

Sometimes works, sometimes doesn't

[drron]

Second Dajops advice about flexible routing.We did the same booking in 2005 before enhancements for travel in 2006.Could not get BKK-LHR but no problems BKK-HKG-DBX-LHR.Fortunately had a stopover left so broke the journey in Dubai.We went the phone booking way.Still SYD-BKK was in WT+ and JFK-LAX had to be in economy on QF.