Melbourne to Tokyo,
in economy, on points.

Where a seat sits inside its distance band is invisible on most pages and decides how safe the price is on all of them. Economy to Tokyo costs 36,200 points one way, read off the zone running 4,801 to 5,800 miles, and Melbourne to Haneda measures 5,069 statute miles by the great-circle computation used here. That leaves the sector a short way above the floor of its band and a long way below the ceiling, which is the comfortable position to occupy.

Headroom is what that position buys. A routing several hundred miles longer still prices at 36,200, because the chart does not re-read the journey until it passes 5,800. Beyond that boundary the next zone runs from 5,801 to 7,000 miles and charges 43,200 in economy, 85,300 in premium economy and 113,900 in business. The margin here is wide enough that an itinerary would have to be built badly on purpose to reach it.

Velocity prices no version of this seat, and the gap is a matching problem rather than a pricing one. Charts on that programme are organised by the airline that operates the flight, so any second figure needs a carrier recorded against one of those charts before a number can attach to it. That match has not been made for Melbourne to Haneda, and none of the five tables held here has been sourced to an operator on the corridor. A price lifted from the plausible-looking table and pinned to an airline that does not fly the route would read as a comparison and function as a fabrication, which is the specific failure this site is built to avoid.

Neither cash cell carries a figure. Qantas publishes no per-route carrier charge, states that the amount is quoted at booking, and leaves the cents-per-point column on this page as empty as it is on every other page here. There is one known remedy, a signed-in reward search read off the booking page itself, and no substitute worth printing in the meantime. A figure compiled by somebody else is a figure this site did not collect.

Four cabins carry a price on this row: 36,200 in economy, 73,800 in premium economy, 98,400 in business and 147,700 in first, against 170,800 for first one zone further out. Economy and business are published as seats for this city pair. The other two are priced by the table and absent from the cabin switch above, because whether a cabin operates on a corridor is a published fact in its own right and has not been collected for this one.

Months of ordinary spending is what the crossover table above converts 36,200 into, pattern by pattern, on each pattern's strongest card, with a sign-up bonus counted only where the pattern clears its published hurdle. Tokyo down the back is one of the shorter runs in this index, which places it inside reach of spending patterns that would never finish a front-cabin target on the same corridor. Direct Qantas earners already hold the currency the seat is priced in. A flexible balance should be read against the bridge table first, since a currency with no published crossing into this programme has no route to this seat at all, whatever its size.

Every figure above came off the programme's published table on the date printed beside it, and the register reports whether a person has re-checked the row since. Bands get redrawn as well as repriced, so a sector sitting comfortably inside one today can sit at its edge after a revision that changes no price at all. Check the source itself before points leave an account.