QANTAS: Tech fail. Frequent flyers can’t even get reward booking page to load. Miss out on premium classic rewards

Qantas dumped an avalanche of award fares today from 11 am. On many social media channels, frequent flyers are complaining about the inadequacy of the Qantas booking site, as it provides a 505 error when you try and book reward fares.

Some success

Others have made it work, with a happy frequent flyer recording that they got a First Class rewards fare from Melbourne to London.

Others are calling the exercise a ‘Complete waste of time’, regarding the availability as ‘Gone or never there…’ and commenting that the Qantas tech is the ‘Freaking worse [sic] website’.

Others are maintaining hope pointing out that the release was advertised as starting from 11 am, and encouraging the unsuccessful to ‘Keep your hopes up.’

Those who were successful seemed to have logged in before the 11 am release time.

Bad Tech

Some users are reporting waiting up to 20 minutes for the Qantas booking page to load online, while others abandoned their computers and used the phone app. Some others commented that this was no the first time this has happened, recalling the same experience was had the last time there was a large release of Reward fares.

This is not the first complaint about the website which is notoriously clumsy compared to equivalent airlines in other territories. It’s about time Qantas spent a lot more on upgrading their website.

2PAXfly Takeout

I unfortunately was occupied elsewhere at 11am, and only got to the site in the early afternoon. I had no luck at all searching for fares between Sydney and LA and Sydney and London. All of my Classic Reward searches ended in a 505 error, while standard rewards resulted in fares requiring millions of points. Admittedly I was only searching for premium fares. Others have reported more success with Economy fares.

For the moment I prefer to believe the social media participant that offers the encouraging ‘Keep your hopes up’, since according to the Qantas media release, Classic Reward fares will be ‘rolled out’ over the next few months.