Award availability in J w family of 4
 

Hi!

I'm about to hit platinum and planning on taking a family holiday on the tail-end of a work-trip.

I would be buying a Y ticket for work, but want to redeem J awards for the family on the same flight so the booking becomes more complex. Generally, is 3xJ reward tickets hard to achieve (and possible Y points upgrade)?

Does hitting platinum allow me more access to rewards seats on request?

Thank you!

3x J awards on the same flight are difficult, but your question is very vague: what route? what time of year? You won't get solid answers to such a vague question.

If you must travel on a particular day (due to your work travel commitments) then you may find it extremely difficult to find award availability. Three or four seats in J is always going to be hard to find and if you have no flexibility then even harder.

As stated, it varies by route, date and even day of week and time of day ... QF has sophisticated yield management software which is effective in predicting demand. 3 J seats is 10% of the cabin on some planes. Now if you wanted SYD-MEL J then I;ve seen 6 awards available (and there are only 12 J seats on 738s). Presuming you are looking for LAX/SIN/LHR then pretty much 2 is the limit. Routes like HKG and NRT will have more availability on some days.

Also Platinum isn't a very high status on QF, I have been on planes with 100 Platinums, so you have a lot of upgrade and even award competition on those routes.

Welcome to FT, huangwenshen! Once you have hit Platinum it definitely worth calling to see if there is a chance to release additional award inventory even if there isn't enough seats showing online.

Thanks everyone for your response so far.

Apologies for the vague question. Although I was asking generally, I appreciate that some details could have helped in providing better responses.

We are aiming for Seoul ICN during early April, preferably flying out of SYD 5th, 6th or 7th.

By the sounds, generally its going to be tough, and platinum may or may not afford me any extra benefits/opportunity. It will really be a game of chance I suppose.

QF does not fly to Seoul, so will need to be on a partner airline:-makes it harder by a magnitude if wanting 4 x business award
Have looked on line for 1 business class award SYD-ICN or SYD-xxx-ICN?
QF partners CX & MH & OZ? Maybe JL

From https://www.qantas.com/travel/airlin...able/global/en for 5 April
---> Qantas Codeshare Flight QF367 is operated by ASIANA AIRLINES

Even for an Asiana Diamond+ it is difficult to get 4 J seats on that route. I did try a few years back and was not successful.

QF never releases awards on codeshares due to the terms of their codeshare agreement. Best you could do is award on JL or CX or MH into ICN. Actually MH SYD-KUL-ICN could have 4xJ award availability (I know you actually want 3 award and 1 upgrade).

On the vast majority of flights MH only releases one initial J award seat per flight. IIRC the subsequent practice is to not release further awards; i.e. once the one award is claimed, nothing further will be released, unless the original traveler cancels the award.

CX J might be available. I've been able to get 5 seats YYZ - HKG - CGK before, it might also be possibly Ex SYD to ICN via HKG, not sure if availability is worse ex SYD though . . . CX traditionally is more generous with award seats. I did book about 10 or 11 months in advance though and it was not peak time.

Hi all - just to round this out, it took a little longer than expected to reach our points requirements, as the original plan to tag off the back of a work trip fell through.

Instead we opted for 4xJ award seats direct to Japan; Korean became considerably more costly as we had to fly through HKG which increased the mile requirements.

SYD to KIX, on QF and return is NRD to SYD on JL

Dates were harder to find during April 2020 holidays; I'm assuming just based on the period, (tried calling QFF hotline, searching on AwardNexus, BA and JL sites) but otherwise we didn't have too much trouble finding the 4 seats.

Thanks again for your advices.

Great result. Finding 4 award seats in J is very difficult and I am glad you were able to pull this off in both directions.