London to Sydney with Emirates Business Class

[Andrew87]

Hi,

Im hoping someone on here can help me out. I’m looking to travel end of August 2025 but can be flexible up to around 1 week for a wedding 6th September in Sydney and staying around 3-4 weeks. I am not a frequent flyer, in fact have only flown a few times in my life so this is all very new to me and I have only been informed about the wedding last week.

I have 600,000 amex points I’m hoping to transfer for 2 business class return flights with Emirates – though would be open to Qatar QSuite business class or something similar – i really don’t think i could handle economy that far when my furthest ive flown is about 4 hours. I tend to build up anywhere from 10-40k points/month, so could have more by time of wedding but didn’t want to leave it too late?

Firstly, is it possible to book those seats with points – do I have enough points? Are there many points based seats for business class flights and am I too late for booking? I can’t seem to see how many points are required on Emirates site, it just gives how many points would be earned from purchasing the tickets in cash.

If i do have enough points, is it a case of transferring the Amex points into Emirates Skywards points, searching for flights and using points online or do i have to call Emirates directly etc? Or could i ask Amex to sort this, I’m sure platinum card holders get some kind of service but maybe not for something this specific? As you can tell I have no idea!

[The Savage Squirrel]

London Sydney is popular and availability is limited while your dates are restricted and relatively soon. You’ll need to think more in terms of taking whatever you can get with any airline rather than thinking you can pick and choose. Be prepared to check various starting points and destinations.

Lots of HfP articles will be relevant but here’s a good start.

https://www.headforpoints.com/2025/02/17/use-avios-fly-to-australia-new-zealand/

[The real Swiss Tony]

I’ve just done a search on EK and it shows 405,000 Avios plus more than £2000 in cash for an award flight from London-Sydney and back, which quite frankly seems absurd. For that money you could just book a cash flight, spend the membership rewards at Amazon and be done.

If you pick carefully you should be able to construct something with Qatar even in August. I could see flexi awards ex LHR and then onwards using the new Virgin Australia as Qatar flights. Would be cheaper than Emirates – but not by much.