Its not just the lack of seats that's the real problem. I don't expect Qantas to give away seats when they could sell them. Rather, it's the inability to work out whether there are any award seats at all on Qantas planes that's the issue. I think most people devide their travel into paid and reward (well, I do anyway)and use points earned to travel in different ways, at different times and to different places from when they have to.

Anyway. When you ring Qantas they will tell you whether they have seats on planes. Either they decide to give some award seats or they don't. Fine. But constantly ringing gets tedious. I was just advocating showing customers, (as United does) all the buckets of availability.

Finally, I understand seats may be limited at the moment. (Although summer fares out of the US to Australia have been at their cheapest for over four years so maybe not too) but February and October are always dead months in and out of Australia. And all travel is cyclical. So I can't see what's wrong with Qantas giving their best customers a look at how to redeem points intelligently on the system.