QANTAS: False rewards on new Classic Plus booking engine

It looks like Qantas might be having some teething issues with its new Rewards booking engine, which is being used to accommodate the new Classic Plus bookings.

I have been having a play with the booking engine in line with the ‘How To’ video Qantas has distributed. I keep coming up with anomalies. Most are related to the top-line results.

Classic Reward in heading, but none bookable

The image below shows a London to Sydney fare on Wednesday, 25 September, with a Classic Rewards fare valued at 55,200 points.

That’s good value for an economy redemption, and it’s even a Classic Reward, not the more expensive new Classic Plus reward. Fantastic, I thought.

The problem is, as you can see below, it is not there. It doesn’t exist. That image shows all the flights listed available, and there are not even any Classic Rewards listed at all.

Although I have found further examples, the engine seems to return appropriate results mostly.

No Multi-city tool

One downside of the new tool is you can no longer do a multi-city search. This had the advantage of showing you the classes of Classic Rewards available for each day of the month.

To use the multi-city booking option, you need to visit the Qantas multi-city flights page. The multi-city option no longer appears on the home page whether you are booking Rewards fares or regular fares.

Non-reward flight options drop-down menu above. Rewards flight drop-down menu options displayed below.

2PAXfly Takeout

I am not sure if this is a new fault. The old rewards engine used to deliver false top-line results impossible to find in the full results.

I’m not sure what is causing this issue. I speculate that it is a complication of offering Classic rewards on Qantas and partner airlines, versus Classic Plus rewards that are only offered on Qantas flights on Qantas metal.

Overall, I think this new look for rewards booking works well. It feels like it is easier to identify Classic rewards. However, I do mourn the loss of the multi-month display, which gave you a summary of when and what class of Classic rewards were available. See below.

Since they are rolling out additional Classic Plus options, including for domestic flights, I hope they will rectify these, and possibly other glitches along the way.