Reward Flights to Australia
 

Hello fellow Ft'ers.

I'm trying to see if there is any award availability that would suit me from LHR to Sydney or Brisbane in club sometime around March-May time 2012.

I understand it is very hard to find availability on BA on this route, but there are number of partner options. As I understand it should be possible to fly to Singapore, Hong Kong, Mumbai or Bangkok with BA, and then catch a flight to SYD/BNE with Qantas or Cathay (via HKK).

My problem is trying to work out how to search for availability. I want to search across the whole date range, this is possible on BA.com for BA flights, but I can only search for partner availability by day. Clearly this will take an unreasonable amount of time to check a 3 month period by day for 6 different routes. Is it possible through BA.com, or is there another tool I can use?
If I do actually find something suitable, will I need to call to book?

The award availability is likely to be poor for LHR-SYD in J.

Possibly a somewhat unusual but quite workable solution is BA to NRT and then QF or JL from NRT to SYD. They may well have much better availability.

I do not know if those flights will connect well, however.

Last time I looked, there were lots of availability in J or F to NRT on BA more or less any time.

Qantas has an online month-by-month availability calendar that works for BA and QF (but not some of the OW partner airlines), although I suspect you might need to be a member to use it. Also, I think you may well have a better availability on BA as a BA Gold than as a non-BA OWE, so you may have availability that I do not see. Anyway, if no-one comes up with a good solution for seeing a month at a time etc on BA website, let me know and I will be happy to have a look for you.

I believe you should be able to book online if you are flying on one of the airlines that is indeed bookable online on BAEC website. I *think* QF is, but not sure if you choose JL.

Yes it appears you need to be a QF member. Can you search for redemptions if you don't have any miles?

Is is possible to search for reward seats using Expert Flyer? Or similar, it seems KVS can do this? Anyone have any experience of this?

Award nexus is particularly good for this kind of search.

Out of the two, only the KVS Tool supports Award Availability on BA & CX (as well as all other OneWorld member carriers):

http://Help.KVSTool.com/#AwardUpgradeClasses_OneWorld

ExpertFlyer does show QF award information, and does not require a QFF account. However Swanhunter is right, for an alliance, multi-day award search AwardNexus is the way to go. It has all the BA/QF/CX award data and offers multi-day searches, as well as a free version for FT members.

We recommend AwardNexus as a compliment to ExpertFlyer in situations like these, and of all 3 services, will be the best for your search.

Thanks for the advice, I'll try Award Nexus

Are Malaysian Airlines in / or joining Oneworld ?
This might open more redemption options to OZ etc....

They are joining, but haven't joined yet. I believe that it is planned for them to join "late next year".

So I found a BA flight LHR - HKG and a QF flight HKG - BNE.
I can book both individually on BA.com, but the HKG flight is priced at 80,000 miles (one-way).
It doesn't seem possible to link them in one booking on BA.com, so I guess I need to call to get them combined in one booking for 100,000 miles. Will it be straightforward for the agent to do this?

Very simple indeed. Just call and tell them what you want. Check that you are charged 100K miles and if there is a problem advise them what BA.com says.

So I managed to find availability to fly LHR - BNE (via MEL) with Qantas without any stopovers.
Unfortunately I can't find any suitable with just BA or Qantas unless I stopover, which I'm not really inclined to do. However I've found that I can fly BNE - SIN with QF and then SIN-HEL-LHR with AY.
Due to the 2 partner rule, it costs a lot less miles to book this as two seperate awards, costing 50k and 80k, I believe it would be 160k in one booking. Is there any downside/risk to having 2 bookings. The connection time in SIN is over 3 hours so there shouldn't be much risk of a misconnect.

You can also connect in PVG too.