Recently I posted how I was able to snag two Qatar Airways Qsuite business class tickets for a trip my husband and I will take to South Africa. We will fly from New York-JFK to Doha, and then onwards to Johannesburg. I wanted to give some insight into the actual booking process, as this was not without issues, and the ultimate resolution.

1. Preparations before booking
2. Booking the flights: not without issues
3. Resolving the problem
4. Avios point deduction remained on hold: the final step
5. Summary

Preparations before booking

I’ve gone into some detail before about how to book Qatar Airways reward flights, as well as how specifically I was able to snag a Qsuite business class seat for the trip to South Africa my husband and I will undertake next year. Besides the overall strategy of how to do this, there are some practical things I did to prepare myself for the actual booking:

• I transferred 190.800 points to Qatar Airways a few months before booking the flights, mostly to take advantage of a 20% transfer bonus. Still, this made sure I didn’t need to worry about the transfer at the time of booking.
• I setup my personal details and that of my husband in my account, so I wouldn’t need to worry about that at the time of booking. Then you can just add the traveler information and go straight to payment.
• I checked every day for availability the week before our intended flight date to ensure consistency in the inventory. Given the time difference, I found I’d be able to book the flights ~361 days in advance, in the evening.

Booking the flights: not without issues

Given that there is something like a 10 hour time difference between the eastern US and Doha, I checked for flight availability on the eve of the day before we were supposed to book the flights, thinking that the flights would have already become available if Qatar Airways made these available based on the local time in Doha. This indeed turned out to be the case, and I was able to find the flight we wanted, with 2 seats available. So, I went to book.

Now, most of the process went without a hitch. However, a problem occured when I went to pay the taxes and fees. The payment never processed. Instead, I ended up at a 404 Not Found error page, and I didn’t receive a booking confirmation. Checking my credit card account, there wasn’t a charge there, either. However, when I went to my profile page, I found the flight listed under upcoming trips, without any indication that I needed to pay:

So this was a bit of a mysterious situation. I logged into the app to see if the flight appeared there, and it did, but ion the app there was a notificaiton that the booking had been made but not paid, and so would be released in a few hours if payment wasn’t received.

So, I followed thew app’s directions and was able to pay inside the app using Apple Pay. However, while the payment did post to my credit card account, it never seemed to hit Qatar Airways and the temporary hold on the flight remained just that: temporary. So, I (stupidly) tried again, only for a second payment to hit my credit card, while the flight didn’t confirm or was ticketed.

I also noticed that in my account, Avios activity showed the 190.000 point redemption as ‘on hold’, suggesting the entire transaction was on hold, and may be more than just a payment issue:

At this point I Googled to se eif others had run into this problem and I found various people complaining that Qatar Airways had implemented a new fraud detection system that may block booking if points were freshly transferred into the account and quickly redeemed for a flight, citing ‘suspicious activity’. The resolution: call Qatar Airways.

Resolving the problem

If you click that button, you’ll be presented with a variety of options. Ignore the various tiles you are presented, and scroll down, to reveal direct contact options:

I decided to call Qatar Airways, but the truth is that the live chat is also very good, in my exeprience. Regardless, I called and was first helped by a friendly woman who heard my issue, and then transferred me to the Award Flight booking department in the US.

Perhaps it’s because I called in the evening on the Wednesday night, but the wait was little to nothing and very soon a guy answered the phone. I explained my situation. He asked for my Privilege Club number and quickly confirmed the flight I had issues with, confirming the booking confirmation number, the dates and times, and passenger names.

Having confirmed this information, he did three things:

• He first confirmed that the credit card payment had been received. In fact, he confirmed that two payments displayed, and promptly cancelled the second one and refunded the money.
• He then confirmed the deduction of the 190.000 points.
• He finally proceeded to ticket the flights manually. For this I was put on hold for about 5-10 minutes while he took care of things.

By the end of the 10 minutes, I received two emails, with e-tickets for both myself and my husband, in PDF format. This is important: do not let the prep go before you are able to confirm the details. Make sure the dates, times, flight number and passenger information is all correct. I found that the rep that wa son the phone was a little pushy to get off the phone, but I insisted to look it over.

Fortunately it all checked out and with that, the whole thing was taken care of and our booking had been finalized. There was just one loose end…

Avios point deduction remained on hold: the final step

After all this, the Avios deduction remained on hold. The customer rep said that it would clear after a few days, but it never did. The thing is, I was concerned that if for any reason Qatar Airways did an audit and found there to be an issue with the transaction, they’d cancel the booking. So I wanted to be sure all transactions displayed as completed.

So about two weeks later I called again, and when I asked why the deduction was still on hold, was told that the IT department could manually set this to ‘completed’. He said he’d send an email. Nothing changed still, even after several more weeks.

Finally, at the start or August I remembered this situaiton and decided to check again: still the transaction displayed as on hold, so this time I styarted a Live Chat. I made sure to provide the date and flight time, flight number and confirmation number. She quickly confirmed the details, and within 5 minutes said it ahd been taken care of. I was stunned. At first I got a text message:

This text confirmed the transaction as having posted to my Privilege Club account and confirmed the deduction of 190.000 points. And, when I went to my account, now I saw that the 190.000 point redemption showed as completed. Finally!

With that, the case was closed and I feel more comfortable that indeed our flights are booked and all is settled. It is unfortunate that this was the experience that I had with this, but I hope this will be useful to any of you running into this same issue.

Summary

When I booked Qatar Airways Qsuite business class flight from New York to Johannesburg, I ran into a payment issue. Rather than showing the confirmation page, I got a ‘404 Page Not Found’ error, and the payment never posted. I ended up calling Qatar Airways to have the flight confirmed and ticketed manually, and after two more chats with customer service, finally 2.5 months later the Avios redemption also posted as complete. I hope this process helps some of you in case you run into issues booking flights with Qatar Airways.