Have the required 280 k points for business class travel for rtw flights.Thinking about flying to S America in 2020 coming home from USA.Whilst in South America considering Machu Picchu and galagpus islands then fly to USA from a good port of entry.
I realise I would have to pay for some internal flights in South America just garnishing for some advice from some forum readers who have done something similar to South America.ty
0/ZERO/NO availability to get on them even 6 months out
You should always be booking about 12 months out for award flights, that is when they are released (actual time varies slightly from airline to airline).
I was looking at 12 months out booking the rest of my flights and checking every week to see if they became available, still nothing was EVER available.
PointHacks notes LATAM redepmtions are pretty difficult, so may be difficult for the OP.
Were you looking through QF only, or BA as well?
@djkelly69: Tried both to no avail :(
Even the agents couldn't tell me why there was no availability. Although to be fair none of them were actually helpful apart from the one lady I got in Australia. Constantly hung up on, told I couldn't do that (rules say I can), no flight there (give them code, oh yeah there it is). Non stop nuisance
Is this even with status like Platinum or P1?
Bronze. The agents I asked said it didn't matter what status I had they could see no flights at all for LATAM.
Your agents are wrong. I'm only on Gold at the moment and I see plenty of availability from Sydney to Santiago. Sometimes the routing is weird like SYD>BNE>MEL>SCL, or SYD>BNE>AKL>SCL, but usually there are better routes available.
Availability wise there's a few days a month usually. May/June for some reason has alot of availability, almost every day. Dec/Jan seems to have pretty good availability.
Well, if you are Platinum or P1, you may request them to open reward seats for you, but it is not guaranteed.
Qantas flies Sydney-Santiago
American Airlines flies to South America. I did DFW to LPB a few years ago on an award ticket.
Sth America is one of those destinations which is well known for it's difficulty in finding award seats.
OP, you're probs best to lob into USA or other nearby area, find your own flights to South America & go back to USA to pick up the RTW where you left off.
We are thinking about doing something similar in April 2020. I looked the flights up a few weeks ago. The flights for April 2020 aren’t available yet so I did a search for 2019 just to see what I could find. I managed to get the entire itinerary with Qantas and Latam. Maybe it’s a matter of booking closer to the date.
When we last travelled around Peru we used Avios rather than qantas points. The flights are short so it only cost 4500 Avios per economy seat.
Redeemed Qantas pts for RTW business class.. our routes is MEL-MCO via LAX(Qantas/AA),MCO-LIM via Miami, tour around Lima-Paracas-Huacachina-Nazca-Arequipa-Cusco-La Paz-Uyuni-SPDA, CJC-SCL(Latam), SCL-JFK via Miami(AA), JFK-MNL then home via HKG (Cathay)..
Date booked: last week of Sept 2018
Flight: July 2019 (4weeks)
Status: Bronze
We tried to book to South America last year for our trip this year. 0/ZERO/NO availability to get on them even 6 months out. Qantas doesn't fly there so had to get via LATAM, even looking 1 month out from booking could not find one single reward flight to book. If you can find any go for it.