Earlier this week, Qantas announced they would release thousands of Classic Reward seats to frequent flyers. Great news!
While it’s not impossible to book Qantas rewards, it does require some searching and flexibility to find seats, so the news of more seats was welcomed by everyone.
Fast forward to today, and things start off great! We’re running a premium subscriber service called You So Fly, where we send out alerts to members about cheap business/first cash fares and award alerts. (ps. if you want to join us, take 45% off with code 45OFF)
So many seats!
This morning we’re finding a LOT of seats, business first class on the most coveted routes. We found loads of seats in business and first from Sydney to La, Sydney to London, Perth to London direct, Auckland to New York etc.
It didn’t last long, though. Not long after 11 AM, the Qantas award search engine started to struggle with demand. Error 500 and connection issues prevented many people from completing a booking or even getting to the search display.
At one stage, I couldn’t even type in a destination!
While thousands (maybe even millions) of visitors to the Qantas site crashed the booking engine, our friends in Europe and America were having a great time snapping up those business and first-class seats!
Other frequent flyer programs swoop in
Being a OneWorld airline means Qantas also releases seats to its partner airlines.
My DMs on Instagram were full of people snapping up seats using their American Airlines miles, Alaska MileagePlan, AsiaMiles and British Airways Avios.
Meanwhile, I got another error, 500…
No doubt many Qantas Frequent Flyers managed to find the flights they wanted, but a disproportionate amount would have had a terrible experience trying to book.
What was supposed to be a positive customer experience would have turned sour for many.
Instead of releasing all these seats in a staged media event, it would probably be more beneficial for customer satisfaction to steadily release these seats at intervals throughout the year.
If you missed out today, don’t worry too much! Qantas does release seats all the time; you just need to be there when it happens. Regularly checking routes or setting awards using a tool like ExpertFlyer are the best ways to find the seats you’re after.
