American Express has added Qatar Airways as a 1:1 transfer partner. Not hugely surprising given that Qatar now uses Avios (American Express was already a transfer partner with British Airways Executive Club, Iberia Plus, Aer Lingus AerClub that all use Avios as well).
Hat tip to Award Wallet
I didn’t like the Q-Suite. Like trying to fall asleep at the bottom of an open grave.
Does Qatar have obscene surcharges like BA or zero like United?
BA has obscene surcharges only on certain routes, like transatlantic flights between US and London. Iberia, which uses Avios too, doesn’t have such big surcharges — only relatively small ones — on transatlantic flights between US and Madrid, But I don’t know about Qatar, but even if so it would likely vary from route to route like it does with BA. All I know is that if you use Qatar to book a flight on another airline that charges fuel surcharges, Qatar apparently passes that on, but that says nothing about booking Qatar’s own flights (primarily through Doha) with Qatar.
How much are the q suites worth in MR? Let’s say RT JFK-BOM
The availability at the saver level is rare which is half the miles required 80,000 vs 170,000 anytime award
80k is one way. RT is 2x
Does Qatar require a passport for US citizens to fly domestic? I tried Qantas and they required me to fill out 2 forms that required passport details just for domestic flights as a US citizen.
Take the ticket number on your receipt and input it on the American Airlines app under the Find Trip and you can just get your boarding pass and manage reservation straight through AA, if that was your airline. Done it before with Qantas reward on AA metal and also Air Canada rewards flight on United metal.
This is huge right? Hard to rack up citi points. Easy MRs…..q suites here I come. Plus would rather use citi points for Wyndham.
Not sure this is a big deal. You could already transfer MRs to BA, which could then be transferred to QR.
doesnt seem like a big deal to me. already have BA avios who transfer to qatar… they have a 30% bonus to BA now even
No change really, just slightly lower barrier of entry. You can transfer to BA avios, then transfer BA avios to QA avios all 1:1:1
True but BA Avios has a ton of transfer bonuses with MR. Unless Qatar does the same BA is more valuable to me.
Will jump on that transfer then
are avios worth it?
Depends on the use case. Great for short-haul AA nonstops.
Most AA flight awards can not be redeemed via partners 🙁
I like them for shorthaul AA flights and shorthaul flights internationally. Also some JAL redemptions are pretty decent. They’re not really jaw-dropping redemptions, but availability is not bad. If you want to do backflips to get some dream redemption look elsewhere, but if you’re the kind of person who is going to go from point A to point B one way or another and want to use CC points to offset that, avios are a good pick.
I recently got a nice redemption on Iberia with Iberia Avios. I transferred TYP to Qatar to get a 30% bonus (payable later). I then transferred from Qatar to BA to Iberia. It was a bit roundabout, but it only took a few minutes.
is qatar redemptions better than avios?
What do you mean “better than Avios”? Qatar now uses Avios, so it’s the same thing. It’s simply gone from 3 airlines using Avios to 4.