Finding Available Qantas Business Classic Rewards Seats on Emirates - Any tricks?

Hi There,

I’ve found the exact same issue when booking my wife and I our European escape coming up in June. We wanted to transit through DBX on our way to Amsterdam. We booked it around late September but having said that we were on QF’s website everyday looking at what they released.

Neither of us are any frequent flyer status of note (ie bronze) so that would have put us on the back foot to begin with and I had heard that Emirates were reducing their reward seats to QF but not 100% how true that is/was.

I was particularly surprised at the lack of seats given emirates flies out of Syd 2-3 times a day. In the end we used our points successfully to get all the way to Amsterdam via DBX in J class HOWEVER we have to go via Manilla as another stopover but I believe it ended up being 1-2k fewer points in totality. It is a slight inconvenience but at the end of the day its still not a bad outcome as we’re going over there for 10 weeks so a night stopover isn’t the worst.

So if you’re not lucky getting on EK408 you may have to go via another port, not ideal but it’s the individuals choice. Im a plane nerd so I didn’t mind the extra leg and gives us a chance to experience three different J classes (QF A330, EK 777, EK A380).

We ended up trying 1001 combinations working backwards to get Business Rewards by working out where say Qantas and Emirates meet at a halfway point hence the SYD-MAN-DBX. Places of note we tried were, Singapore, HK, Seoul, Bangkok, to name a few.

Whether or not this was the best strategy, it worked for us and that’s at a Bronze level.

Good luck

Check availability every day. Seat availability comes and goes and you might just get lucky.

Thanks Lps988.

Doesn't hurt to check every day.. EK availability does come and go, so you might get lucky. I once snagged 2x J SYD-DXB on Boxing Day about 6 weeks before.

The reason why you can not find any Emirates seats is the as of April 2019 Emirates no longer have flights out of Sydney

Welcome to j class availability with QFFF. Basically it sucks. Lots of opportunity to earn points but trying to redeem them is very, very difficult.

I have had a lot of success booking Emirates J as a multi city trip like EUROPE-DXB-ASIAN CITY-BNE OR SYDNEY on Emirates or Qantas and as long as you have stopovers of less than 24 hours the points are the same as a one stop flight