Booking with Avios on Qatar Airways

[lookofdisdain]

So despite being hailed as the “sweet spot”, it seems availability to AUS/NZ is practically zero unless you want to choose Flexi and pay double the quoted avios? Getting frustrated with the whole thing now, spend years scraping together points and then you can’t use them how you want. Any advice?

[Ladyshopper]

I had similar thoughts to you – I’d been looking earlier this year for them, and all that were being released were the double avios seats. However, in November a whole load of seats were released at the normal avios rate for this coming year, so I was able to book seats out to Auckland and back from Sydney, which I had just about lost hope of being able to do.

I think the key is to just be flexible, keep checking every day, and hope that something similar to the above happens and be able to jump on the opportunity if it arises.

[indiacpapa]

I had a lot of trouble with BKK for Feb. Nothing out of Spain (where I live). Then in late Nov as mentioned a whole load were dumped. They’ve pretty much gone now but occasionally open up. I found it helpful to check each sector individually as if you search eg lhr-akl it doesn’t seem to show if either of your segments have normal availability if the other segment doesn’t.

[Ian m]

We booked business Dublin to auckland in December for February flights. There was availability on most days