Some time ago Qatar Airways introduced new rules that basically limited most of us from booking award flights for anybody but yourself. Fortunately, the worst of those rules has been removed and everybody should be able (after jumping through a small hoop or two) to book award flights for companions again.

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.

Previously, A New Rule Severely Limited Who You Can Book Award Flight For.

Previously, new rules were added with regards to who you can book flights for using the Avios in your account. Those rules meant that you can only book flights for yourself using points, unless you qualify to book for others first using a variety of mechanism. There were ways to geta round that, but it removed a lot of flexibility that the average person would likely find too cumbersome to deal with.

As part of those new rules, new features were introduced:

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.“

That Last Rule is Now Gone, SoYou Can Now Book for Others Again With an Account that’s 30+ Days Old

Thankfully, the rule that states that you have to credit a flight to Privilege Club is now gone, which means you can add people onto your list if your account is at least 30 days old. This removed by far the biggest hurdle to redeeming points for Qatar Airways flights through Privilege Club. Needing an account that 30+ days old and adding people onto your list is still a little annoying, but given the previous situaiton, it feels like a breath of fersh.

Concretely, this means you still need to prep a bit well before you are going to actually going to book your flights, but once you have your companion onto your list, you should be good to go.

Keep in mind that you can only add people onto ‘My List’ which already have Privilege Club account, while ‘Family & Friends option doesn’t necessarily.

Summary

The rules that were implemented that limited whether you can redeem your Avios for companions has largely been rolled back. Now, you can once again redeem for companions as long as they are on your ‘List’ or on the ‘Family & Friends’ list, and you account needs to be at least 30 days old. However, you no longer need to have Avios activity from flights (whether on Qatar Airways or with a partner) in order to redeem for a companion. This is positive improvement, even if Qatar Airways doesn’t fully roll back to how things used to be.