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Hey! You’re reading an outdated Free First Class Next Month series. Check out the latest version published in April of 2015 here.
This is the twenty-second post in a monthlong series that started here. Each post will take about two minutes to read and may include an action item that takes the reader another two minutes to complete. I am writing this for an audience of people who know nothing about frequent flier miles, and my goal is that by the end, you know enough to fly for free anywhere you want to go. Previously Searching BA.com to Redeem American Airlines Miles.
Using qantas.com for award searches can help you get maximum value from your American Airlines miles. American partners with the oneworld alliance and several non-oneworld partners. Unfortunately oneworld award space searching is fragmented, and I use aa.com, ba.com, and qantas.com.
I’ve described how to use aa.com and ba.com for award searches:
- Free First Class Next Month: Searching aa.com to Redeem American Airlines Miles
- Free First Class Next Month: Searching ba.com to Redeem American Airlines Miles
Now I’ll explain how to use qantas.com.
Qantas shows award availability for airberlin, American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Finnair, Iberia, and LAN. It also shows Qantas availability, but not the same availability that AA has access to, so I use aa.com to search Qantas availability.
To search Qantas, sign up for an account or sign into yours on qantas.com.au.
Once signed in, an award search box is on the next screen. Make sure to select the award search tab.
Leave the default option “Qantas and Partner Classic Award” selected. Type in your cities and choose Return or Oneway. I like to select “Flexible with dates.” The calendar it brings up is quite handy:
Red seats mean there is economy space. Purple means business class space. If you want to change what classes of service are displayed, manipulate the check boxes above the calendar.
If you’re planning on using American miles, you shouldn’t check Premium Economy because that option is not available with American miles.
If you hold your cursor over a specific date, a yellow box will pop up telling the shortest award available that day, listing its duration and number of stops. That’s a handy way to sort by nonstop or other specific routings.
If you want to see the exact options on a specific date, select that date and click the Select Flight button. For instance, here are the flights available from Los Angeles to Hong Kong on December 24.
Ignore the part at the bottom that say it would cost 104k points for this flight. If you are using American miles, you should use qantas.com.au for searches, but you should determine the price from the AA partner award chart, which prices LAX-HKG in business at 55k miles each way.
Occasionally an itinerary has an exclamation point above where you select the cabin.
Holding your cursor over the exclamation point tells you which flights are serviced by a cabin worse than the one listed. In the example above, Buenos Aires to New York is first class, but New York to Los Angeles is only business class.
What I like about searching at qantas.com is that it has great coverage of oneworld, has an easy-to-navigate calendar, and shows logical connections. But there are some drawbacks.
1. Qantas.com doesn’t show all oneworld members. Amman isn’t a city on the dropdown menu of “From” cities, so good luck finding Royal Jordanian space.
ba.com does show Royal Jordanian flights.
Qantas also doesn’t list S7′s hub of Moscow-DME–qantas.com shows Moscow-SVO–so you should search S7 space on ba.com too.
I also couldn’t find JAL space on qantas.com.au, but JAL space does display on ba.com.
Qantas hasn’t yet added Malaysia Airlines to its search engine either as ba.com has.
2. The dropdown menu for the “From” city doesn’t list all options. For instance, Tampa is not listed on the dropdown menu.
So if you want to search from an unlisted city, like Tampa to Hong Kong roundtrip, you would have two options.
The first option would be to search Miami, Chicago, Dallas, and New York to Hong Kong since AA has flights from Tampa to those cities according to wikipedia.
Then you could go to aa.com and look for domestic space.
The second option is probably a little quicker. You can search Hong Kong to Tampa oneway to find the return. And you can search Hong Kong to Tampa roundtrip to find the outbound by narrowing in on the “return” results for your backward search.
Although you can’t search TPA-HKG, you can search HKG-TPA roundtrip, which obviously includes TPA-HKG as one direction.
3. Qantas releases more Qantas award space to its own program. That means Qantas results you see are unreliable. Luckily this problem is moot now since aa.com displays Qantas space in award searches. Search Qantas space on aa.com if you are using AA miles.
4. Qantas.com times out so quickly between searches.
What to do when you find the space
Note the dates, times, flight numbers, and cabins, and call AA at 800-882-8880 if the space is for airlines not bookable at aa.com.
When to Search aa.com, ba.com, and qantas.com.
I search for awards on aa.com if I can. aa.com displays: American, Alaska, Hawaiian, British, Qantas, Finnair, and airberlin.
If I can’t, I search on qantas.com for Iberia, Cathay Pacific, and LAN.
If I want to search JAL, Malaysia, Royal Jordanian, or S7, I use ba.com.
Continue to Using Delta.com to Redeem Delta Miles.
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Very useful post! My interest is flying from the US to India (Mumbai specifically). Used all 3 engines. While I agree with your take on aa.com and it not displaying RJ and IB. But contrary to what you said about Qantas, I did find availability on RJ from JFK-AMM-BOM in Business.
Very useful post! My interest is flying from the US to India (Mumbai specifically). Used all 3 engines. While I agree with your take on aa.com and it not displaying RJ and IB. But contrary to what you said about Qantas, I did find availability on RJ from JFK-AMM-BOM in Business.
If you have an HTML editing plugin on your browser, you can trick the website by editing the menu to insert the airport code that you need. At one point SCL wasn’t on there (might still not be there) but I got it to work.
It was amusing. We were planning a trip SFO-NYC (American) NYC-Tokyo (American) and Tokyo – Shanghai (JAL) and then back to NY from Shanghai with a colleague the other day. We had to use all three search engines, but we planned it all for 70k miles 🙂 So everyone was happy in the end.
[…] This is the twenty-third post in a monthlong series that started here. Each post will take about two minutes to read and may include an action item that takes the reader another two minutes to complete. I am writing this for an audience of people who know nothing about frequent flier miles, and my goal is that by the end, you know enough to fly for free anywhere you want to go. Previously Using Quantas.com to Redeem American Airlines Miles. […]
[…] trick we need is the exact same one that we occasionally have to use on qantas.com. If you want to go Lima to Cuzco […]
[…] Mile Value Calculator ← Free First Class Next Month: Searching AA.com to Redeem American Airlines Miles Free First Class Next Month: Using qantas.com to Redeem American Airlines Miles → […]
[…] find Cathay Pacific award space, you have to search British Airways site or Qantas.com. American’s own site does not display Cathay Pacific seats. I chose BA.com and quickly found […]