US Airways Dividend Miles (Pre-FlightFund Merger) - Qantas partner redemption rate increase?

Has the rate for partner award redemption with Qantas increased? As Qantas is one of the few remaining participants in Dividend Miles, I am hoping to burn a couple hundred thousand with Qantas. I see that a business-class round-trip is now 105,000. On United it is 90,000. What gives?

Does anyone know how the Qantas partner redemption likelihood looks for the Winter holidays?

Thanks.

The increase occurred a few months back for all the QF awards. UA is still lower, but their service (in all classes), crappier.

December availabity might be tight, as it is mid-Summer in Australia and many travel then.

In nay case, I would recommend QF Business Class anytime!

Regarding your question on winter holiday availability, bounce over to www.qantas.com (http://www.qantas.com) and sign up for their frequent flyer program. Then select "award bookings" under the "frequent flyer" tab. You will be able to see award seats that qantas makes available to their own members.

There may or may not be a direct relationship between what is displayed as open, and what seats that they allow other airlines to book. At least you will get some indication as to what might be available, though.

Every once in a while you can even spot a First Class award seat using this method.

If US and UA get the right to codeshare, say goodbye to Qantas' outstanding service in first/business and hello to UA's crappy service to Australia.

No way AA/Qantas would allow this partnership to continue under those terms.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Scion:
If US and UA get the right to codeshare, say goodbye to Qantas' outstanding service in first/business and hello to UA's crappy service to Australia.

No way AA/Qantas would allow this partnership to continue under those terms.

</font>

fwiw, i spoke to a rep at the usairways int'l award desk yesterday and he thought that the us/qf partnership was "very solid" and would survive the us-ua alliance. i suspect this may be true as long as us is not part of *A. if that were to happen, you'd be able to use air new zealand which is probably just as good.

as for the other partnerships--nw to asia for example-- i'd suspect they'd be more likely to disappear quickly.

also, i would comment that while united's service (and food) is sometimes less than ideal, their business class seats and first suites are among the absolute best in the air.



[This message has been edited by kv99 (edited 08-09-2002).]

Please remember that just b/c an airline is a member of an alliance it does not mean that it can't have additional partners.

For example, not only can you redeem your UA Mileage Plus account for flights on UA and other members of the *A, but for flights on DL, JK, SV, AQ, EK, Aeromar, BWIA West Indies Airways, Cayman Airways and LAPA.