Whether you're looking to fly to Australia on Qantas itself or use your points to fly one of its many partner airlines worldwide, Qantas' calendar search tool is a great way to find those hard-to-book award seats.
It can be a little tricky to pull up the calendar, but this tool can be a big help in pinpointing potential deals by giving you a whole month's glance at award availability – flights you can actually book with your miles – all at once.
While booking award flights with Qantas points may not always be the best option – especially after a recent devaluation – you can still use this tool to find availability, then book through another loyalty program with better pricing. In other cases, such as booking Qantas business or first class awards (or even Emirates First Class), using Qantas points may prove to be your best (or only) option.
And even if you've never flown Qantas and don't have any points, they're actually pretty easy to come by. Since Qantas is a transfer partner with a few of the major banks like American Express, Capital One, and Citi, earning these points is a cinch with cards like the *capital one venture* or the *amex gold card*.
Read on to learn how to access and use Qantas' flexible calendar search to book award flights … you'll be glad you did.
Step 1: Sign up for a Qantas Frequent Flyer Account
First things first, you'll need to have a frequent flyer account with Qantas. You can sign up for free. And you don't even need to have any miles in your account to use its search tool.
You'll use your Qantas Frequent Flyer number to log in and search for award flights through Qantas. You'll also need to keep this number handy to transfer points from Amex, Capital One, or Citi.
Just know, if you're planning to transfer credit card points to book an award ticket: Brand-new accounts (or repeatedly transferring points in quick succession) will often result in your points geting stuck in limbo. For that reason, it's a good idea to create an account now … even if you don't have any immediate plans to use it.
When searching for award flights, using a desktop (or laptop) computer is important. Trying to search on a mobile device does not allow you to get the full picture of award availability.
This is especially true for Qantas, as you'll need to first navigate to the multi-city search page to pull up the calendar view. Doing a regular search from the homepage only lets you search one day at a time.
After you log in to your Qantas account, click “Flights” at the top and then click “Multi-City” under the “Book” heading. Better yet, you can also use this link to go directly there.
Once you're there, select “Book with Rewards” to search for award flights. We typically recommend searching one-way at a time. Just click the “X” on the right side of the page to remove Flight 2 and Flight 3 from your search.
Depending on the route you're searching, you may sometimes need to search roundtrip (i.e. Flight 1 and Flight 2) to pull up the calendar view in both directions (more on that later). But for this first example searching from the U.S., I'll show you a one-way search for simplicity.
Enter the route you'd like to search. When choosing a date, select the “Flexible with dates for all flights” checkbox.
Then choose the total number of passengers traveling and click “search flights.” This is an important step to ensure you're searching for the exact number of seats you want to book.
Step 3: Pull Up the Flexible Calendar View
As long as you've selected “flexible dates” when searching from the multi-city search page, you'll land on a flexible calendar showing you about a month's worth of availability at once.
You won't see prices on this calendar. Instead, you'll get different colored ribbons, which indicate there's availability on those dates in a certain class of service based on the color: Red is for economy, yellow for premium economy, gold for business, and platinum for first.
If you want to filter your results to only show specific cabins, you can deselect the ribbons at the top and then click “Go” to update the calendar.
In this case, I filtered for Business class and see there is only one single date, Sept. 14, with availability in business class.
You can quickly search more dates by clicking on the “Next 14 days” or “Previous 14 days” buttons at the bottom of the calendar. Since there's no availability in business class in this date range, the filter I had selected was automatically removed, and the tool defaults to showing all classes of service.
One important thing to note about this calendar tool is that the availability displayed could be for any airline and for any number of stops. There is no way to filter for nonstop flights or specific airlines in the calendar view.
This means you'll still need to click through and check exact dates to verify if the availability is for the flights you actually want.
In the above example, that Sept. 14 flight from Los Angeles (LAX) to Sydney (SYD) is actually a one-stop flight via Dallas (DFW), with the short domestic flight in economy and longer flight in business class. Unfortunately, there aren't any nonstop flights available in business class for two passengers.
Let's look at another example for a flight from Los Angeles (LAX) to Taipei (TPE). This calendar view searching for one passenger shows plenty of dates available in business class at the very end of the calendar.
When selecting Aug. 5 and clicking “Continue,” I see that business class is only available on a Japan Airlines itinerary with a stop in Tokyo, not the nonstop flight on China Airlines I was looking for.
If you want to check a different date, don't use the back button on your browser – you'll get errors. Instead, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the grey “Back” button on Qantas' site. Using these navigation tools is key for a smooth experience when using this tool.
This will bring you back to the calendar view so you can select another date without the need to start from scratch. Choosing Aug. 7 instead, I see there is business class availability on the nonstop flight I was originally looking for.
This type of trial and error is required when using this calendar tool, but it'll feel a little less like finding a needle in a haystack by first narrowing down which dates could potentially have availability on the flights you're looking for – especially when searching for those coveted business and first class flights.
As shown in the examples above, the Qantas calendar tool can help to find availability on Qantas flights as well as its Oneworld partners like American, Japan Airlines, and Cathay Pacific – and you can also use the tool to search for availability on Qantas' unique partners outside the oneworld alliance, like China Airlines and Emirates.
When You Need to Search Roundtrip
As I mentioned earlier, there are some cases where you do need to search roundtrip (or both Flight 1 and Flight 2) from the multi-city search page to pull up the calendar view in both directions.
This seems to depend on the origin country in the “from” field for “Flight 1.” For example, if you try to search for a one-way flight from Dubai (DXB), you'll get an error message.
If you run into this error, click “add a flight” and try searching again, only with “Flight 1” originating in Australia or the U.S. In this example, I'll search Melbourne (MEL) to Dubai for “Flight 1” and then Dubai to Melbourne for “Flight 2.”
Your results will land on a calendar view for both flights separately. Filtering for first class, I'm able to see there are plenty of dates from Melbourne to Dubai in October and November, and just a few from Dubai to Melbourne in late November and early December.
Clicking through, I can see that this availability is indeed Emirates First Class – one of the most luxurious ways to fly in the entire world.
The most common reason you'd need to search this way is to find award availability on Emirates flights departing Dubai, but there could be other cases where this is required, too.
Basically, if you ever get errors when trying to search one-way from the multi-city tool, try adding a flight to your search, make sure “Flight 1” originates in either the U.S. or Australia (some other countries may work, too), and then enter the flight you're really interested in as “Flight 2.”
Step 4: Search Exact Dates to Verify Pricing & Use More Filters
One thing you don't get with the calendar search function on Qantas' website is the price. To find out how much Qantas charges, you'll need to take the dates you found on the calendar and plug them into an exact date search.
The exact date search also allows you to use more filters, such as number of stops and airline.
To do this, navigate to Flights > Book > Flights from the homepage or use this link. Select “Rewards” and the total number of passengers. Then, enter the route and date you found when using the calendar tool.
Again, searching one-way at a time is easiest, and you'll be able to search most routes one-way from this screen. You can choose the class of service here when searching transpacific routes, but this option disappears if you're searching other routes. No worries … you can always filter by cabin after searching.
Once you get the results, you can use the filters to narrow down the list of flight options. Here is where you can filter for nonstop flights or choose to see only Qantas flights, or include others, too. You can also filter by cabin, time of day, and flight duration.
At the top of the results is a handy one-week view of rates. Qantas recently raised its award rates in early August – you can find the current award charts here. The cheapest are the “Classic” awards – so look for those.
The one-week view of rates at the top adjusts when you filter by cabin, so you can more easily see which days have availability in the cabin you want to fly. You can also scroll to the previous or following weeks by using the arrows on either side.
Step 5: Transfer Your Points & Book!
Once you've found the flights you want, it's time to book. You'll want to use the exact date search when you actually go to book. The calendar function is most useful as a search tool, not for actually booking.
When booking with Qantas, there are no cash fees to make changes or cancellations. Instead, you'll need to pay a 5,000-point fee to make changes or forfeit 6,000 of your points to cancel and get the rest of them back.
If you don't already have Qantas points, you can transfer them from Amex, Capital One, and Citi. These transfers are typically instantaneous, but Citi transfers can sometimes take a day or two.
As stated earlier, you may be able to book the same flights through a different frequent flyer program for a better deal, so it can help to shop around. This is particularly true for China Airlines business class. The Qantas calendar search is a great way to find availability on those flights, but you'll often get a far better deal booking with Air France/KLM's Flying Blue program.
That being said, Qantas is notorious for limiting award availability on its own flights to partners. You'll find much better availability to fly Qantas business or first class when redeeming Qantas points – many times, it's the only option.
Bottom Line
While Qantas points may not be at the top of every frequent flyer's list, its calendar award search tool is one of the best in the business.
Pulling up the calendar view can be a little tricky, but with this guide, you should be able to quickly and easily see a full month of award availability at once – helping you zero in on the flights you want to book – whether that's flying Qantas or one of its partner airlines.
