If you’re itching to use up your bountiful balances of Qantas Points, get your trigger fingers ready. On Friday 24 February 2023, Qantas is set to release another swathe of Classic Flight Reward seats across its international network.

Qantas has confirmed the release to Point Hacks, with Qantas Loyalty CEO, Olivia Wirth, noting that international flights were still one of the most popular ways to use Qantas Points.

We’re releasing tens of thousands of new Classic Flight Reward seats to international destinations to make it easier for our members to use points towards their next overseas trip.

The number of points required to book reward seats hasn’t increased in years … so these seats present great value.

– Olivia Wirth, Qantas Loyalty CEO, 21 February 2023

Qantas will also extend its commitment to boosting reward seat availability on international routes by 50% until the end of the year. While most of those seats will be in Economy, we’ll still see smatterings of premium cabin availability.

UPDATE: The Qantas website is still under heavy load, but if you have partner points currencies such as British Airways Avios or Asia Miles, you may have better luck booking through those channels. We’ve found good Business and First Class availability across a range of dates.

More details are in our social post below. Missed out? Register for our reward seat alerts now and you’ll be able to see today’s latest email as soon as you’ve signed up.

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Upcoming reward seat release details

  • Seats are released from 11:00 am (AEDT), on Friday 24 February 2023
  • Extra reward seats will be available across all cabins (including Business and First) across the full international network of over 30 destinations.
Qantas has been releasing reward seats periodically throughout 2023.

We don’t yet know what travel period the seat release spans, but we expect it will be for flights until December 2023. Not all dates will be included, so you should consider multiple travel periods in your pre-planning. Make sure you’re familiar with how to search for Qantas reward seats and how to bring up the reward seat calendar.

Example reward seat costs

Here are some popular routes and the number of Qantas Points required to book, plus fees and taxes. All values are one-way and per person.

RouteEconomyBusiness
Sydney-London55,200 pts + $233144,600 pts + $443
Brisbane-Los Angeles41,900 pts + $209108,400 pts + $334
Sydney-Tokyo (Haneda)31,500 pts + $14882,000 pts + $198
Melbourne-Auckland18,000 pts + $15741,500 pts + $157
Sydney-Fiji (Nadi)18,000 pts + $10741,500 pts + $107

Summing up

Qantas is releasing another tranche of Classic Flight Reward seats, all at once. This is a departure from the pre-COVID tradition, where a few seats were regularly released 353 days in advance. Premium cabin availability was also initially limited to Gold Frequent Flyer status members and higher.

Since we’ve moved on from the pandemic and started travelling again, this has all gone out the window. Instead, Qantas now seems to prefer to release big chunks of availability every few months.

At Point Hacks, we regularly cover these releases through our social channels and through our free reward seat alert newsletter.

The upside to this is usually all Qantas members, including Bronze and Silver, can see the seats at the same time. There are also usually more seats available per flight than we’d normally expect – more than four Business Class seats per flight is not unheard of.

Some will say these releases are a PR stunt (which is true enough), but we’ve also found that many readers have actually found enough seats to book their next family holiday in a premium cabin. That’s what we like to hear.

If there’s a downside, it’s that everyone will be descending on the seats all at once. You’ll need to be quick to make travel plans, especially as fee-free changes and cancellations aren’t offered anymore. And if past releases are anything to go by, we expect the Qantas website will take a hammering once the seats drop…

We’ll be sending out a ‘reward seat alert’ newsletter this Friday once we’ve seen some of the routes available. Be the first in the know – sign up for our reward seat alerts for FREE!

Qantas readies ‘massive’ release of international reward seats including Business and First was last modified: August 25th, 2023 by Brandon Loo