I would suggest one of the west coast CX departures connecting via HKG (though, seeing as your home airport is on the east, it might not be the most convenient for you).

EDIT: CX has flights originating EWR/JFK, so JFK/EWR - HKG - BKK.

how do you find availability for this?

Good luck! Finding the same for the family albeit for a different route, it is such a pain :(
If you don't already have one, create a BA Executive Club account, and use their 'Book with Avios' functionality. It'll be on the left sidebar.

Anyone able to book a premium cabin on Qantas?
 

Hi,

I've searched high and low for domestic business awards on Qantas using Iberia avios. I can never find anything, even if BA.com shows 9 seats availability. I know internationally Qantas releases few premium seats, particular to partners, but usually domestically they are OK. Should I give up or has anyone had success?

Thanks,
PC

My family of four booked 4X LGA>ORD @17K and 2X LGA>DCA @11K.
I have not been able to swap in my AA# for my Iberia # on these bookings even though I have tried via "manage my booking" on Finnair and Royal Jordanian. If anyone has any tips on this or has had recent success with the methods let me know. Thanks

I am only seeing Economy availability, as shown below. There would normally be at least one additional column for non Azul/Blue bookings. It appears that I can book these flights however, taxes and Avios get computed through to the next page. BA and IB get the same redemption feed opportunities from Qantas, so all I can suggest is calling up and trying the BA options.

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...a1d4e386e6.png

Thanks CWS. I am specifically looking at SYD-HTI, the latter I can't seem to select as a destination on BA.com so I can't check BA first for this destination. However, when checking other routes BA is certainly showing business availability on Qantas flights (e.g. SYD-MEL) yet Iberia's website will only show economy on the same flights.

Let me know how you get on with Iberia on the phone as im looking at the same issue, i suppose if this was easy everybody would be at it!

There has been a recent crack down by AA to not allow this anymore. For some reason they don't want their members to get their hard earned benefits if they purchase an award on their metal from a different airline.

I also tried using other airline websites to add it, but some airlines show both frequent flyer program numbers including the Iberia website itself. However, using the AA record locator for the flight it shows the frequent flyer program is the Iberia one.

I'm also trying for QF domestic business class availability and even though BA and AS shows it IB+ seems to ave nothing. But curiously the same problem with BA domestic business class availability doesn't show for anything except City Flyer out of LCY, and even then only if you look for a return flight (apparently Cityflyer isn't treated by IB+ as BA so only return flights and no cancellations possible). This seems crazy when they are owned by the same conglomerate. I haven't tried calling them about it yet to see if the agents can help, but I don't hold out much hope for this.

Does Iberia normally only release 1 business class award seat at a time? I've been looking at SFO-MAD till end of schedule for 2, but nothing comes up.

Booked MIA-MAD and MAD-LAX in J for May 2019. 85,000 Avios and about $240. I'll take it.

I wound up finally starting to get a trickle of bonus Avios in for our family of 5 after providing the necessary documentation via the email IB provided. We only booked what we were going to fly in August anyway but in the end that should be enough for 36,000 per person. We are SEA based and often fly SEA or PDX to LAX and I was happy to see that we can each get 2 roundtrips on AA for those routes out of our bonuses. Not a huge value, but nice for those quick weekend trips we take down there where it's a minimum of $250 per person per ticket. We more or less get $2500 of value for tickets we were going to buy anyway for our trip through Spain next month, not a bad ROI for the hassle of the back and forth with them.

So I managed to book return SYD-HBA on QF in J for two people. Of course Iberia website showed no business availability, BA website showed business on the direct flights I ended up booking via a 45 minute call to Iberia customer service in Spain. The guy was helpful but I was put on hold for so long on multiple occasions so not sure why the system/process was so slow. Interestingly, Iberia agent said he couldn't book me on the indirect flights via Melbourne which the BA website was showing J award availability (I had wanted these flights as they were my preferred dates where the direct flights weren't available).

So in summary I think Iberia has a subset of BA's business award availability on Qantas flights. As such searching for availability on BA is a good start but not a guarantee. Iberia website is just plain useless.