On-Line oneworld award availability engine?
 

Just venturing over into the dAArk side from my comfortable perch with UAL/*Alliance. Is there an internet tool that allows searching for oneworld award availability? With *A, ANA has a pretty good tool.

I'm hoping to be able to book award travel SMF-LIM this summer and oneworld seems to have many better options than does UAL. I'd probably swap some of my UA miles for AA miles. Tried using the AA website but I personally don't have enough miles to see all of the award possibilities, and would also consider AA partners such as Lan Peru.

Thanks in advance for helping out a stranger ;)

Qantas

Thanks a bunch ^

Just signed up for the Qantas program and used the search engine - very convenient and just what I was looking for.

One final question - is there any difference in availability for oneworld flight awards between carriers or are all award flights available to all oneworld carriers? The ANA site shows availability for *A flights but often UAL doesn't have the same inventory of flights as do other *A carriers.

Thanks in advance.

Yes there can be a difference, but the differences are unpredictable. A rule of thumb might be that its 90% correct.

Thanks - it's posters like you that make FT such a great community ^

A couple of issues with the Qantas Award booking engine:

• There has seems some recent observation about errors with Cathay Pacific availability/being able to book.
• Qantas allow their FFers to book 353 days in advance; it's oneworld partners get to see availability from 330 days.
• For WHY awards, Qantas have an additional availability bucket (T) for their elites.

Further, some OW destinations are not listed in the online tool (which is limited to about 250 airports). The search engine gives different results depending on how you search. Eg search for LHR to SYD on a multicity and the results will not necessarily find all the options that you can see when manually doing multiple searches LHR to xxx and xxx to SYD where xxx is SIN, BKK, HKG, MEL, AKL, PER, BNE, LAX, etc.

In addition to the Qantas engine, I usually cross check/search using the Asia Miles search engine for CX and the JAL engine for JAL.

As noted, many Oneworld cities are missing from Qantas web site, particularly those that don't route via Australia or ar a little less common - and more likely to have award seats!

You have to ring up Qantas to see if there is an award, then they will charge an extra 2500 points to claim the award - even though you can't actually do it online.