Recently my husband and I booked the first leg of our trip to South Africa next year, and we did so with Qatar Airways. Since then, some people have asked us how we managed to do that, given that booking Qatar Airways business class with points for a reasonable fare can be challenging. In this post I want to explain the best ways to book Qatar Airways business class with points, and specifically how we did this.

BY THE WAY: Right now (until July 15) there’s a 30% transfer bonus from American Express to British Airways Club and other Avios-earning airlines! If you have Amex Rewards Points, this is the perfect time to transfer them over! So read on to understand how to snatch those Qsuite seats…

1. Why would you want to fly Qatar Airways business class?
2. How to: the best way to book Qatar Airways Qsuite business class award seats
   1. Why is Qatar Airways Privilege Club your best bet?
   2. How we ultimately booked our Qatar Airways Qsuite business class flights to Johannesburg
   3. Step 1: Do your homework
   4. Step 2: Accumulate the points
   5. Step 3: Transfer to Qatar Airways
   6. Step 4: Finalize the deal!
3. Other ways to book Qatar Airways business class
   1. American AAdvantage
   2. JetBlue TrueBlue
   3. Alaska Mileage Plan
4. Summary

Why would you want to fly Qatar Airways business class?

So I haven’t flown Qatar Airways yet myself, but Qatar Airways is almost as much of a ‘household’ name as Emirates, in terms of being known for a good onboard passenger experience, regardless of travel class. They have consistently been awarded prizes for offering one of the best business class experiences in the world.

At the center of Qatar Airways fame is their ‘QSuite‘ business class seat: a versatile product that with all the modern bells and whistles, including doors and high-end entertainment screens. Most impressive is how you can combine single suites to become double or quad suites, so you can sleep with your partner in a ‘double bed’. or dine with the four of you. This versatility is pretty amazing, and to my knowledge Qatar Airways is the only airline that offers such features in their business class product.

This hard product is combined with a soft product that is highly regarded. Friendly and attentive service is combined with high quality food and drink, and Qatar Airways recently further enhanced their service offerings by offering unlimited caviar service – in business class: pretty much a world’s first since typically caviar service is a first class thing.

How to: the best way to book Qatar Airways Qsuite business class award seats

‘Best’ is of course subjective, so I will share what worked best for me. I take into account the ability to transfer points from various credit card issuers, the award cost and the consistency of availability at the ‘saver level’ (lowest cost). And for me, the winner is Qatar Airways’ very own Privilege Club frequent flyer program.

Why is Qatar Airways Privilege Club your best bet?

The key is that Qatar Airways’ Privilege Club uses the Avios miles currency. I plan to write an extensive post about Avios and how to use them, but briefly, you should think of Avios like Euros: a single currency that can be used in several countries. Like the Euro, Avios is a miles currency that can be used with several airlines, namely British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus, Finnair and Qatar Airways. There’s two important things about Avios:

1. Each of these airlines has their own frequent flyer program, but you can transfer your Avios between all of these programs after you link the individual accounts back to your British Airways account.
2. Every major credit card issuer (American express, Chase, Citibank, Capital One and Bilt) allows you to transfer your points to at least one Avios airline, so you always have a way to get more Avios.

Now, a few more important details about Qatar Airways specifically:

1. Qatar Airways makes most premium cabin seats available to members of its own Privilege Club frequent flyer program. So, booking through Qatar Airways gives you the best chance to snatch your award seat, but you will need to book a year in advance to have the highest chance.
2. The cost with Qatar Airways is reasonable: New York-Doha will cost you 70.000 points and ~$200 in taxes and fees per person, and this is typically operated by a Qsuite-equipped aircraft. To Johannesburg or Bangkok will be 95.000 points and ~$300 in taxes and fees. That’s not the best value (as you’ll see below), but it’s definitely not bad!

How we ultimately booked our Qatar Airways Qsuite business class flights to Johannesburg

Taking all of the above together, here’s how we booked our Qatar Airways business class flights with points…

Step 1: Do your homework

Go to the Qatar Airways website and search for award availability as far out as possible. Note the availability and price. Repeat over the next month to gauge consistency: this is key, because without it you can’t really plan. I found consistent 2-seat availability on the New York – Johannesburg route for 95.000 points per person, or 190.000 points total for 2 persons.

Step 2: Accumulate the points

Both my husband and I opened new Chase credit cards: we opened Chase Ink small business credit cards, both of which had elevated welcome bonuses. Combined with the points amassed before, we earned enough points for return flights from New York to South Africa in business class.

Step 3: Transfer to Qatar Airways

Back in March, there was a 20% transfer bonus from Chase to British Airways, which uses Avios. I opened a British Airways account and a Qatar Airways account, then linked them. I transferred 159.000 points to British Airways and received 20% bonus, for a total of 190.800 British Airways Avios, and then transferred the full balance to Qatar Airways. Now I had enough Avios in Qatar Airways to redeem for the flights.

If you haven’t linked your accounts yet, here’s what you’d do. First, create British Airways Club, and Qatar Airways Privilege Club accounts. Go to each of the airline’s websites, and sign up. For British Airways, scroll all the way down and hit ‘Join us now’, and for Qatar Airways look at the top right of the site, and click ‘Sign up’. Then, follow the prompts.

Once you created both accounts, login to your Qatar Airways Privilege Club account, and click the round user account icon in the top left. In the menu that shows up, hit the button ‘Dashboard‘. Once you’re in the your dashboard, hit the button ‘View my Avios balance‘.

Once there, there should be a button to link your Qatar Airways account with your British Airways Club account (back in the day it was called Executive Club):

At this point, you’d follow the prompts. It will include logging into the British Airways Club account, and perhaps establishing two-factor authentication first. Once you’re done, you’ll find that the ‘View my Avios balance‘ button now shows the balance of both Qatar Airways and British Airways club (as above, on the right). Now you should be free to transfer points between the accounts. You can do that from this same page, by filling out the form right below the above status pane:

It should be an instantaneous move, and you should be able to go ahead and immediately use these Avios to book your flight. You may want to transfer over a small amount of points, just to familiarize yourself with the process.

Step 4: Finalize the deal!

With the points in place and your homework done, calculate what date you need to book the flight. By doing dummy bookings, I found that Qatar Airways opens it schedule 361 days in advance, so I was able to extrapolate what day we needed to actually book. I did a test the day before to see what the process was like, ensured all data was entered in advance, and when the day came, the availability was there! It felt awesome that all the planning finally came together and we were able to snatch the award seats on our preferred itinerary!

To be clear, here’s how to go about looking for award space. You’d go to the Qatar Airways website, and in the flight search tool, select origin and destination, choose one way, the date of departure, and choose 1 passenger in business class (will display as ‘premium’). Don’t forget to check ‘Book using Avios‘.

When you search, you will be shown availability. For this JFK to Doha itinerary, 70.000 points is the saver price. Anything more than that, and you’re looking at ‘flexi’ which is NOT what you want. That will likely be double the points!

When you select this option, it will expand to show you some of the cancellation and change conditions, and will give you the option to select this fare. Note: to actually do that you will need to have enough Avios to book the fare. Otherwise you’ll get a window saying you don’t have enough Avios…

To summarize: it’s about looking ahead, planning and persevering. This is not rocket science: you need to know a few details, but otherwise it’s about having the right strategy. The above worked splendidly for us, and should work for you as well! This is how we ultimately were able to book 2 business class award tickets on Qatar Airways for only 79.500 points plus ~$300 per person (20% less than the 95.000 points needed!).

BONUS NOTE: Right now (until July 15) there’s a 30% transfer bonus from American Express to British Airways Club and other Avios-earning airlines! If you have Amex Rewards Points, this is the perfect time to transfer them over! So read on to understand how to snatch those Qsuite seats…

Other ways to book Qatar Airways business class

While the above worked well for us, there are other ways to book with Qatar Airways. I wanted to spend a little bit of time looking at that, as well as epxlaining why we didn’t go that route.

American AAdvantage

American AAdvantage often has very attractive award pricing. Unfortunately for us, this option was never an option: getting American AAdvantage miles is incredibly difficult because it doesn’t partner with any major credit card points currency. Instead, you have to engage with American Airlines by flying with them, using their travel or shopping portals, and get one of the co-branded Citibank credit cards.

But what if you do have a stack of AAdvantage miles? Unfortunately, lately it’s been essentially impossible to find availability through AAdvantage on Qatar Airways. I used Seats.Aero’s excellent ‘Qsuite Finder’ tool to discover availability through the whole next year, and found one date, from San Francisco to Doha for 70.000 points snd $7.65. That value is excellent: Qatar Airways would have charged 70.000 and ~$200 in fees, so you save ~$190 in taxes and fees when booking with American.

But, in my eyes, if there’s barely availability, it’s ultimately no use. Hence, AAdvantage is out for now.

JetBlue TrueBlue

The situaiton with JetBlue’s TrueBlue program is actually surprisngly good, and may be another good option to book Qatar Airways. Primarily, availability is overwhelming. It seems it may even be better than with Qatar Airways. Seats.Aero shows a multitude of dates having availability. Plus, the taxes and fees are very low: only $7.65 (like American AAdvantage)!

So what’s the catch? Two things: for one, the low taxes and fees are countered by a high points requirement: 90.000 points versus only 70.000 points through Qatar Airways from most anywhere in the US (besides New York-JFK – that’s 98.000 points through JetBlue). Second, whereas Qatar Airways seems to make 2 seats available at schedule opening, JetBlue only lists 1 seat as available. Flying with two people? You’d be out of luck.

For those two reasons, we didn’t go with JetBlue.

I will add one good thing: accumulating JetBlue points is not difficult: JetBlue partners with American Express, Chase, Citibank and Capital One, so getting those TrueBlue points should be fairly easy, though note that only Amex and Chase offer 1:1 points transfers.

Alaska Mileage Plan

The last option is Alaska Airlines’ Mileage Plan. For our purposes, Alaska has next to no availability from New York-JFK, so for that reason it didn’t make much sense to go that way given that other programs did have predictable availability. But, for those of you not in New York (or willing to position), what can you expect?

Unfortunately, Alaska’s availability is only a little bit better than American’s. American had a grand total of 1 option – Alaska had 7 available flights, all within the next week. The price of these varied based on the origin: From the east coast (minus Atlanta) the price is 70.000 points plus $20.14 in taxes and fees. From the west coast (and Atlanta), the price is 85.000 points plus $20.14 in taxes and fees. But, the catch is that each flight only had 1 seat available at the time of searching.

I should also add that, much like American AAdvantage, accumulating Alaska Mileage Plan miles is challenging. Mileage Plan only partners with the Bilt Rewards ecosystem, meaning there’s little opportunity to transfer miles from credit card partners.

So overall, while the prices are quite attractive if flying from select east coast cities, the lack of predictable availability and the difficuly to accumulate Mileage Plan points, makes Alaska a less than ideal way to book Qatar Airways business class award seats.

Summary

In this post I explain the various ways to redeem points for Qatar Airways Qsuite business class award seats, and I explain how we strategized to successfully book our Qatar Airways business class flight from New York-JFK to Johannesburg.

While you can book Qatar Airways through American Airlines, Alaska Airlines and JetBlue, the best way is still to book through Qatar Airways, because they make the most seats available to their own frequent flyers, offering consistency and predictability. Fortunately, it’s easy to accumulate Qatar Airways Privilege Club Avios, because you cna transfer from any major credit card issuer to an airline that also uses Avios: British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus and Finnair. Then, you transfer those Avios over to Qatar Airways to book your flight.

My recommendations if you plan to redeem points for Qatar Airways are to (1) do your homework and (2) plan well in advance, more than a year! This will give you the opportunity to predict the amount of points you need, and to strategize to accumulate them in time. It’s likely there will also be transfer bonuses from credit card issuers to any of the airlines that use Avios as their miles currency (see above), allowing you to use less points than actually needed.

Let me know if you have any questions or need guidance. I’m happy to help! Reach out through the contact form.