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. This is a remarkable seat and its coveted for good reason! I previously also posted how I booked our flights on Qatar Airways Qsuite through Qatar Airways’ very own Privilege Club. Unfortunately, Qatar Airways just put in place new rules that limit the ability to book award flights for anybody but yourself. Fortunately, there are solutions! So read on to learn what to do.

My favorite way to book Qatar Airways award flights is through Privilege Club

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

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 destination beyond that, including destinations such 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.

Qatar Airways limits for who you can book award flights; makes it impossible for most of us to do so through Privilege Club

Qatar Airways has now added new rules effectively immediately with regards to who can book flights for who using the points in their Privilege Club account.

It used to be that you could use your Privilege Club 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 through Privilege Club, 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 Privilege Club 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, and this 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?

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 bene open more than 30 days, there’s three things you can do:

• First of all, and simplest of all, is to credit a cheap, short, domestic flight with a Qatar Airways 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, so you might as well use them to ‘unlock’ award redemptions for others through privilege Club’s ‘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.
• 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.

Summary

Qatar Airways has implemented an annoying new rules that says you can’t redeem your Privilege Club Avios just for anybody: you’ll need to add people either onto your ‘List’ or they have to be part of the ‘Family & Friends’ miles pooling feature. Plus, you can’t simply add people onto your list, since you need to have some miles accrual activity before you can do so. Fortunately, you can easily get this by crediting a cheap short haul American Airlines flight (if you’re based in the US) to Qatar Airways Privilege Club, and this should unlock the ability to add people onto your list. From there you’ll be able to book awards for those on your list without issue.