Is Qantas Actively Blocking Emirates First Class Awards?
Emirates first class award space on flights not touching Australia have vanished from Qantas Frequent Flyer inventory
Update: after reaching out to Qantas, we've heard back and while the issue wasn't acknowledged. We can confirm that there's no change in policy. This can either mean 2 things: A) Emirates is restricting access to Qantas (unlikely because Aeroplan members are still getting full access), B) there's a technical issue on the Qantas side of things cause by the award pricing change (likely because our data on seats stopped on August 5th). Flight Hacks is still waiting on a response from Emirates.
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After the dreaded 5th of August passed, eagle-eyed Flight Hacks readers (thanks Philip) started to report that Emirates First Class flights appeared to have vanished from Classic Flight Rewards. Upon doing some digging around, we can now conclude that Qantas is actively blocking certain routes on Emirates in First Class – or at least, First Class isn’t getting listed.
So far, we’ve identified that any Emirates First Class flight from Europe to Dubai is blocked from the system. They are, however, still being sold as married segments from Europe to Australia via Dubai.
For example, during our research we could see award space available from Rome to Perth via Dubai in First Class with Emirates, but when searching for the same flight from Rome to Dubai, only Business Class would show.
To rule out the likelihood of Emirates blocking access to Qantas, we searched for the same flight using Aeroplan. As you can see, First Class award space is still available via Aeroplan, which would indicate the issue is coming from Qantas.
We also got our friends (thanks Lays) with Emirates Silver, Gold and Platinum status to check award space in First Class using Skywards (since you now need status in order to book First), and once again, all the Emirates First Class award space is available.
All this seems to coincide with the award pricing update on August 5. We can see on tools such as Seats.Aero that First Class awards seemingly dried up around that time, as there’s no fresh data since.
The same also seems to be the case for US/EU fifth freedom flights, which used to be plentiful but have vanished from the award calendar as well.
Possible tech glitch?
It’s possible that the repricing of awards has caused certain errors on routings. I called the Qantas Platinum support line hoping they could see availability on their system, but the agent could only see that EK flights were being sold as married segments, meaning a connection to a third city was required for it to show availability.
A worse, but unlikely scenario is that Qantas is actively blocking First Class award flights on Emirates that don’t touch Australia.
What’s next?
Flight Hacks has reached out to Qantas and Emirates for comment. Hopefully this is just a technical glitch and will be resolved soon. When we learn more, we’ll update this article.
Summing up
Emirates First Class award seats booked using Qantas Frequent Flyer points have completely dried up when flights don’t go to or from Australia, either directly or on a married segment. While this is likely a technical glitch, it’s still odd – since we can still see Emirates First Class award space on Australia–Dubai flights, Australia–NZ fifth freedom flights, as well as Europe to Australia via Dubai and vice versa.
