Melbourne to Tokyo,
in business class, on points.

Two figures decide how much a band boundary is worth, and on this row they are 98,400 and 113,900. Business from Melbourne to Haneda costs 98,400 points one way, read off the zone running 4,801 to 5,800 miles. The zone past it, covering 5,801 to 7,000, charges 113,900. Down the back of the same aircraft that identical boundary moves a price from 36,200 to 43,200 instead. Four figures and one line on a map: crossing it costs more points in front than behind, by a wide enough distance that the two cabins are really facing different risks.

Whether that step is a live risk or an abstraction depends on where the sector sits inside its band. Our great-circle computation puts Melbourne to Haneda at 5,069 statute miles, which is a short way above the floor at 4,801 and a long way beneath the ceiling at 5,800. Ordinary variation in routing does not travel that far. The floor is the nearer boundary of the two, and it is also the one no itinerary can reach: a routing adds distance to a great-circle figure and never subtracts it. So the only crossing in play is the ceiling at 5,800, and what waits on the far side of it is the step this page opened with.

Premium economy in this band costs 73,800 and first costs 147,700, against 170,800 for first a zone further out. Neither appears in the cabin switch above this page. A published price establishes what the programme would charge and establishes nothing at all about which cabins fly a corridor, and that second fact lives in an airline's own route material rather than in a reward chart. Nobody has collected it for Melbourne to Haneda.

Velocity prices no version of this seat, for the reason the economy page for this city pair sets out at length: that programme's charts are built around the operating airline, and no carrier has been matched to a chart on this corridor. A single figure is missing from the comparison column and the reason it is missing is recorded rather than hidden.

Cash sits outside the points price and outside this page's reach. Qantas publishes no per-route carrier charge, states that taxes, fees and charges are quoted at the time of booking, and leaves the cents-per-point column empty here as on every other page of this site. One remedy is known — a signed-in reward search, read off the programme's own booking screen — and nothing else is worth printing in its place.

Months of ordinary spending is what the crossover table above converts 98,400 into, pattern by pattern, on each pattern's strongest card, with a sign-up bonus counted only where the pattern clears its published hurdle. Direct Qantas earners hold the currency this seat is priced in already. A flexible balance needs a published crossing first, and the bridge table shows which crossings exist rather than assuming that a large balance implies one; where none is published, the row shows no conversion at all, and that emptiness carries information.

Now the part no table can supply. Reward seats have to be released before a price means anything, and release is a commercial decision the airline takes against demand nobody outside it observes. This site holds no collected statement from Qantas describing when front-cabin reward inventory appears on this corridor or in what quantity, so it describes none. An earlier version of this page did describe one; it has been removed and logged.

Each figure here was read from the programme's published table on the date printed beside it, and the register above reports whether a person has re-checked the row since. Bands are redrawn as well as repriced, so a sector sitting comfortably inside one today can find itself at an edge after a revision that changes no price on the page at all. Open the source before points leave an account.