I have a question regarding rules on a OW Award I hope to book through QF. It will be 300,000 points for up to 35k miles & 5 stopovers in F. My question is, can I enter countries -UK and Australia in this case- multiple times (effectively backtracking twice) to get maximum value from the 35000 miles. I can't find any reference in the website (or searching this forum)but wonder if anyone has experience of this.

Specificially, the route I'm after is (june 2004)LHR-MAD(stop 1)-X/LHR-BKK(stop 2)-SYD(stop 3), then november 2004 SYD-HKG(stop 4)-X/FCO-BHX (stop 5), then dec 2004, BHX-X/FRA-X/SIN-SYD (or MEL if SYD is not allowed).

Can anyone tell me if this is allowed - it seems too good to be true to be able to go Europe-Oz-Europe-OZ in F all for 300,000 QF points

I can't book this until I hit the 360 day window for the last leg, which will happen in in December, so any other advice on better routings (achieving the stops in MAD, SYD, HKG and BHX then ending up in OZ) is welcome.

Thanks.

I think issues you'll have include:
-QF awards usually include the mileage to the point of origin (rule 10.4.3)
- only one departure is allowed from city/country of origin (10.4.5a)

I know that some rules are different for ow awards (# of free stopovers, upper mileage limit is 35K, etc.), but I'm not sure that the two above are different.

[This message has been edited by landspeed (edited 10-12-2003).]

The routing you describe is valid for a Oneworld award on AA; unfortunately QF's rules are different and more restrictive, but I think it may be valid on QF as well. You will have to check with QF directly as they don't publish all of the rules. The other point to remember with Oneworld awards is that you can change dates of travel but NOT routing or carrier used for a segment (so pick your segments carefully).

Thanks both of you. I will check with QF - might even try to book the first few sectors to specific dates (next June) with the rest as open (as more than 12 months out).

By the way, any advice on carrier/routing choice I am hoping to use (mileage comes in just under 35k at the moment)? Number_6 you were incredibly helpful with the last OW Award I booked (your suggestions such as BA LON-HKG then cx HKG-SYD rather than QF/BA LON-SYD went really well). Any more tips and tricks welcome.

Thanks again

Interesting route. When I looked at this route couple of funny ideas came to my mind.

Per Qantas rules I understand that you need to come to your starting point. If so is this a legal route.

chi-lon-bom(stopover)-lon-chi(stopover)-lon-bom(stopover)-lon-chi ?

Your trip ends when you return to the city of origin. But you could return to LAX or DFW instead (but not ORD). Or originate at MKE.

Glad you enjoyed the trip -- travel can be wonderful under the right circumstances, but it is often hard to arrange for those to happen. You might check whether F is offered on some of your flights (QF may be down to only having LHR with F service in Europe by then). It is getting fairly hard to find routes with good F service, there are only a handful left. I like CX as an airline in both technical and service aspects and go out of my way now to fly them (if only they flew trans-Atlantic!).