Award Miles Question
 

Does Quantas allow travellers to include domestic travel when using an awards program flying from the USA to Australia? Can I include unlimited travel in Australia under the same ticket? f not can someone suggest the best way to combine a frequent flyer award and unlimited domestic travel?

Thanks in advance-Happy Holidays

Are you using Qantas miles, or partner miles (i.e. American Airlines)? With American miles on Qantas, I'm fairly certain you get 1 "free" stopover at your first point of entry in Australia.
So, for example, you could book LAX-SYD-ADL on 1 ticket. You'd then need to purchase separate tickets for intra-Australia travel (no unlimited travel on an award ticket).
I'm "reasonably" certain you can also do an open jaw on your award ticket.
So, you could fly LAX-SYD-ADL-MEL-LAX on one award ticket. In this scenario, your outbound award ticket is essentially LAX-ADL, with a free stopover in Sydney. You'd then need to arrange all your transportation between Adelaide and Melbourne, or anywhere else you wanted to go in between.

Only other option would be the Qantas Aussie Air Pass, which would get you a flight from USA-Australia, and 3 domestic flights, starting at $999 + tax (although could be a lot more depending on your departure city or date of flight).

We are booked with American Air FF miles for the following itinerary:

Our hometown-LAX-SYD-Cairns (Sydney does not count as a stopover since we are only passing through on way to Cairns)After a week in Cairns:

Cairns-Darwin (had to use additional AmAir FF miles (20K per person I think) for this Australian domestic flight. We booked it through American Air.

Darwin-SYD where we stopover for 3 days.

SYD-LAX-Hometown

So our Australian circuit using the base FF miles out of our hometown allows for 2 stopovers (in our case Cairns and Sydney) The flight back to Sydney could have been from Cairns or any other city but if not Cairns we have to get to that other city using additional miles or driving or paying for the domestic flight. We were able to use the AmAir miles on Qantas for that domestic flight.

If we hadn't wanted to stopover in Sydney we could have made Darwin the 2nd stopover and it wouldn't have cost us more miles. We could have flown Cairns to Darwin on the original FF ticket, stopped over in Darwin, then flown Darwin-SYD-LAX-Hometown but with no stops.

Make sense??

If you are using AA miles,you get one national stop if you want it,(has to be a gateway city like LAX)) and one international stop, before or after your destination. Also you can do an open jaw ticket. We went on Qantas too, to Sydney and left from auckland. If you are going economy class, look at those seats near the back of the plane. The configuration is 2-4-2 at the back. Further forward it`s 3-4-3. The seats are all the same size, but you get extra room with those rear row seats. I usually sit in row 70, at a window. The bathrooms are at the very back, so don`t sit there.

We used FF miles on American for our upcoming trip to Australia and New Zealand. For 90,000 miles each, we are flying Chicago - Sydney - Cairns - Christchurch - Auckland - Chicago. The only place where we weren't able to get exaclty the flight we wanted was the leg from Cairns to Christchurch. We have to make two connections to get there instead of just one. Oh well. And we have to go from LAX to Dallas before getting back to Chicago. But it saved us thousands! It probably depends on the time of year you are going as to how easy it will be to get the flights you want. You also won't be able to book it yourself on American's website. You will need to pay the $15 booking fee and actually go through an agent, but the ones I dealt with were very helpful and worth the money.