My husband and I recently had a fantastic trip to South Africa, and one of the highlights was certainly our flight on Qatar Airways Business Class from JFK to Doha, which featured the carrier’s award-winning Qsuite business class suite. This is a remarkable seat and its coveted for good reason! I previously also posted how I booked our flights in Qsuite through Qatar Airways’ very own Privilege Club. Unfortunately, new rules are now in place that limit the ability to book award flights for anybody but yourself through that program. Fortunately, there are solutions! So read on to learn what to do.

My favorite way to book Qatar Airways award flights is through their own program

Qatar Airways has its own loyalty program, which is Privilege Club. Their flights can be booked through there, but through other partner programs as well. In the US that would be principally through American AAdvantage or Alaska Atmos Rewards, but also through foreign programs, such as British Airways Club. They all have their own advantages, but my own favorite is to book through Privilege Club.

Principally, booking through Privilege Club allows you to book Qatar Airways business class flights right as the schedule opens. Ultimately that’s how we booked our flight. The pricing is not the best, typically costing 70.000 +$300 for US East Coast to Doha, or 95.000 + $300 for a far away destination beyond that. That would include destinations such as far away as Johannesburg or Bangkok. You can get these flights more cheaply through American AAdvantage for example, but the issue is that their schedule opens later than Qatar Airways’ does. Hence, flights are gone by the time you’d book them through American AAdvantage, and you’ll have to resort to booking last minute.

New rules limit for who you can book award flights; makes it impossible for most of us to book flights for anybody but ourselves

New rules have been added, effective immediately, with regards to who you can book flights for using the Avios in your account.

It used to be that you could use your account to book award flights for yourself and other people without any restrictions. This is now changing: in principle you can only book award flights for yourself, and not for anybody else. However, there are two tools that will allow you to still book award flights for others, besides yourself:

1. You can start a ‘My List‘, to which you can add up to 4 Privilege Club members you’d like to redeem your Avios for.
2. There is the ‘Family & Friends‘ option, which similarly allows you to add up to six people (which can be non-Privilege Club members) for the purpose of miles pooling.

As you can see, ‘My List’ is a new feature. When you click that button, it becomes immediately clear that there’s a problem in its use though, and this is also why these rules will block most of us from redeeming Avios for anybody but ourselves. As you can see, there’s a message displaying a lock, with the text “You can start adding members after you’ve been a Privilege Club member for 30 days and have collected Avios by flying or using one of our co-branded payment cards.“

So I’m out of luck, and cannot add anybody to My List as things stand. So what is there to do? How could one get around this?

Here’s how to circumvent these rules

If you get the same message as I did, hope is not lost, and the solutions are simple. Assuming your account has been open for more than 30 days, there’s three things you can do to once again redeem Avios for anybody but yourself:

• First of all, and simplest of all, is to credit a cheap, short, domestic flight with a partner to Privilege Club. For example, a short haul American Airlines flight (e.g. JFK-DCA) or British Airways flight. These will barely yield you any miles or loyalty points into your respective American AAdvantage or British Airways Club anyway, so you might as well use them to ‘unlock’ award redemptions for others through ‘My List’.
• Another option is to get one of the Qatar Airways co-branded credit cards, through Cardless. There’s a basic and a premium version, and I don’t think either of them are particularly attractive, so I wouldn’t recommend this, given how many better cards there are out there that you could get instead.
• Finally, keep in mind that these rules are specific to Privilege Club. Of course you can still go ahead and book these award tickets through other airline loyalty programs, including British Airways Club, American AAdvantage and Alaska Atmos, among many others.

Personally, I would highly recommend to go with the first option: crediting a flight to Qatar Airways. Do ensure it’s a cash fare that’s not a ‘basic’ fare, as there may be limitations on whether that will count towards ‘unlocking’ the My List feature. After all, these days a lot of airlines don’t provide any sort of miles or status points for basic fares. I would not bother with the credit card and while you can certainly book through other programs, the most predictable flights to book will be through Privilege Club over partner programs.

One thing that’s not clear to me is whether this is something that would need to be done regularly, or once is enough. For example, would it be required to get some miles accrual activity once per year, almost like a status re-qualification? Right now that doesn’t seem to be the case as there’s no language to that effect in the terms and conditions, but I suppose time will tell. As more people use these features, the details become clear.

Summary

New rules have been implemented that limit whether you can redeem your Avios for companions: you’ll need to add people either onto your ‘List’ or they have to be part of the ‘Family & Friends’ miles pooling feature. Plus, to complicate things further, you can’t simply add people onto your list, since your account needs to be at least 30 days old, and you need to have some miles accrual activity before you can do so.

Fortunately, you can easily ‘unlock’ this ability by crediting a cheap short haul American Airlines flight (if you’re based in the US) to Qatar Airways. From there you’ll be able to book awards for those on your list without issue.