Qantas unlocks thousands of reward seats, with a catch

Frequent flyers struggling to redeem their stash of Qantas Points may be in with a better chance from this week, with the Red Roo rolling out more Classic Reward seats plus a limited-time half price sale on Points Plus Pay fares. 

The airline is adding 6,000 seats at the lowest number of Qantas Points in business and economy for the European Summer, with those seats “made available on every Qantas flight to London and Rome from June-August 2024.”

This covers both the flagship Sydney-Singapore-London A380 and Melbourne-Perth-London Boeing 787 flights, along with the seasonal Sydney-Perth-Rome service.

And with 6,000 seats hitting the market across that 12-week period, expect high availability – along with high demand, given that travellers will be able to snare a business class seat to London or Rome for just 144,600 Qantas Points.

In addition, as part of the regular release of reward seats, some 35,000 business and economy seats have been made available today at classic reward rates across the Qantas international network.

So what’s the catch we flagged in the headline? As part of this points play, the Oneworld member is also halving the number of points required for first, business and premium economy class booked using the Points Plus Pay option for five days only, through to Friday 27 October 2023.

While 50% is a worthy discount in its own right, as Executive Traveller recently detailed these fares don’t represent the best points value, because the cash price of the fare is simply converted to an equivalent number of Qantas Points (and generally at a very unfavourable rate). 

That said, if you’ve got a mountain of points and regularly rake in many more – such as earning Qantas Points on business expenses – and can’t find a classic award seat to where you want to go and when you want to go, Points Plus Pay is arguably better than not flying at all.

The airline says today’s reward seat offer is the first part of its $80 million ‘pain point reduction’ spend, which was first flagged in September and is expected to also include customer service enhancements and improved inflight dining. 

Qantas’ reward seat release closely follows the Australian Senate inquiry over Qatar Airways’ denied request to increase flights into key Australian ports, in which numerous Qantas frequent flyers also voiced concern over the lack of reward flight availability.