You can now search, but not book, Qatar Airways redemptions on ba.com

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Well, its progress of a sort, I suppose. Yesterday, Qatar Airways redemptions were loaded onto ba.com. This gives Avios collectors (and American Airlines members) a head start at making redemptions, ahead of Qatar’s official entry into the oneworld alliance at the end of the month.

For some reason, whilst you can search Qatar availability on ba.com, you cannot book it. You get an error message asking you to call your local BA service centre to complete the booking. You can, at least, use ba.com to find out what seats are available before you ring.

The key thing to remember when searching for Qatar redemptions is that they fly from lots of places, not just London! Manchester is the other UK departure point. Their interactive route map is here.

The current cities running the new B787 with the new business class pictured above are (ex-Europe) Copenhagen, London Heathrow, Frankfurt, Munich, Oslo, Stockholm and Zurich. If you can’t get a seat from London, you may want to try a redemption from one of the other cities. Non-European routes with 787′s are Bangalore, Delhi, Jeddah and Riyadh. Fly Qatar on other routes, including from Manchester, Paris or Brussels and you will get older equipment with older seats.

There are some good deals to be booked.

I did a random search last night. Fancy Christmas in Australia? Imagine you can’t get seats?

There are four seats from Manchester to Perth in Business Class on December 8th, for example.

My gut feeling is that getting TO Doha will be a doddle if you are happy to start from anywhere in Europe. Focus on getting seats for the ‘Doha to Your Destination’ leg and then add on the ‘Europe to Doha’ bit afterwards. Happy hunting.

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Category

oneworld alliance partners, Qatar Airways and Privilege Club

This article is closed to new posts. Discussion continues in the HfP Forums.

VV says:

3 Oct3 October 08:17

BA shows a lot of the seat avalability of QR but I believe this is fake or phantom seat, since for the same seat you cannot find in Qatar Qmiles itself.
You can book some of ex. Africa departure of QR flights on BA.
- Rob says:
  
  3 Oct3 October 08:39
  
  Only 1 person on FT has commented so far, and they have successfully booked a redemption using a routing spotted online.
  
  No mention of anyone ringing and being told they can’t book (yet).
Matt Vaughan says:

3 Oct3 October 08:52

Good to see, although destinations which are new to Oneworld seem not to be loaded yet (for example, Islamabad). Are these likely to be loaded when QR is fully integrated, do you think?
- Rob says:
  
  3 Oct3 October 09:50
  
  I reckon this is a ba.com issue, and that adding a new destination is trickier than adding flights to places already in the system.
simon says:

3 Oct3 October 09:20

I cant seem to be able to look up flights with partner airlines, how do you do this?
- Rob says:
  
  3 Oct3 October 09:50
  
  You’re using ba.com and not avios.com? They will show automatically if seats are available.
Andrew says:

3 Oct3 October 09:22

I have recently been searching for a seat in First on Qantas from London to Dubai and whilst I see availability, it shows the same error message (to call Exec Club) when you try and book or view taxes. I’m not sure why this is happening with some One World partners, but certainly has been the case for some months with QF. And QF’s First class is much more appealing than BA’s: A380; chauffeur drive at departure and arrival airports; and use of Emirates’ fantastic First Class lounge in DXB and the unique lounge to aircraft arrangements – no more dreaded wait at the gate lounge.
- Rob says:
  
  3 Oct3 October 09:51
  
  Agreed. That Qantas issue has been a pain ( although not as big a pain as the overnight flight to Dubai from London, which is stupid scheduling).
  - andy21 says:
    
    3 Oct3 October 10:16
    
    Oh I actually always take the BA overnight flight from DXB at 2am (but then I don’t have kids) – I have my 4pm check-out from Grosvenor House, have some dinner at the Marina then head out to the airport for drinks in the lounge before sleeping on the flight then shower and breakfast in the arrivals lounge and straight to work.
    
    So do we know why the QF flights can’t be booked on-line?
    - richie says:
      
      3 Oct3 October 11:29
      
      it has been like this since they started flying there in march or whenever
      - darrenf says:
        
        3 Oct3 October 13:27
        
        The QF thing is definitely temperamental rather than permanent. I’ve seen it throw that error for days on end, but also had it work. I booked SYD-MEL-LHR earlier this year, twice.
    - DeltaCharlie says:
      
      3 Oct3 October 11:55
      
      I follow the pretty much the exact same schedule….. Trying QF in PE next month as had used my 2 companion vouchers already this year. So it will be the CX gold status for lounges which will be a nice change from the useless BA DXB lounge.
      - andy21 says:
        
        3 Oct3 October 12:06
        
        The EK lounges at DXB will be a nice change for you indeed from the BA one (even with its updgade to Galleries status it’s still not great – just nicer chairs!). I may try PE with QF myself – again, a better offering than BA’s WT+ I think with meals more closely matching J.
        
        Also I HATE the check-in procedures for most airlines at DXB – having to wait until check-in opens just seems so outdated now, it felt like I was waiting at a bus station with people sat on luggage, the last time I made the mistate of arriving at the airport too early to check-in. In the EK terminal they let you check-in whenever (within reason probably) and go through to departures as at most airports.
      - DeltaCharlie says:
        
        3 Oct3 October 14:13
        
        Used the EK lounges before when flying with them, the lounge food at EK LHR is in my opinion the best i have found to date (Doe and Co i believe) also the business only floor of the DXB terminal also makes the whole process so easy.
        Agreed on the waiting for a desk to open nonsense, at midnight that can be so frustrating and the worst part of the trip without a doubt!!
        The attraction of PE on the 380 is the very small cabin upstairs at the back, behind J, hopefully should be a quiet night flight home.
PGW says:

3 Oct3 October 09:26

I booked a QR redemption using Avios yesterday.

I did have to call eventually but, interestingly, when I selected itineraries including but not solely QR flights I could have booked online. I can therefore confirm that the award flights shown on ba.com do exist. Whether that’s true across the board I don’t know but the BA agent offered me several alternatives.
- Roger says:
  
  3 Oct3 October 09:38
  
  How were the add-ons.especially YQ for fuel ‘surcharge’?
You Can Now Search, but not book, Qatar awards on BA.com says:

3 Oct3 October 09:48

[…] for this but I am sure it will be useful to everyone wanting to check out OneWorld redemptions: You can now search, but not book, Qatar redemptions on ba.com Dale. Dale Reardon. Blind PhD candidate at ANU undertaking research into disability […]
PGW says:

3 Oct3 October 09:58

Hard to make a direct comparison because it will no doubt be route specific but I reckon the charges were just over half what BA would charge for a similar itinerary.
- Roger says:
  
  3 Oct3 October 10:13
  
  Thanks.
  
  What’s the secret to finding QR availability at ba.com?
  
  Given the general non-availability of BA F and CW redemptions to Cape Town, I wanted to check QR to CPT or JNB but found BA availability only, i.e. zilch.
  
  There was plenty of availability to CPT with QR when I was researching my last Diamond Club redemptions (*), so I suspect there are indeed QR opportunities with Avios. Of course, I could call and ask, but I’d prefer to research first and then book.
  
  (*) I can’t remember whether the JNB-CPT was with SA.
  - Rob says:
    
    3 Oct3 October 13:04
    
    Are you searching by leg?
    - Roger says:
      
      3 Oct3 October 14:18
      
      Bingo! Thanks.
Andrew (@andrewseftel) says:

3 Oct3 October 10:12

Shame they don’t fly to AKL. Would have been good to get another OW option there.
- Lady London says:
  
  3 Oct3 October 16:00
  
  A staff member in AKL told me early last year that the issue is that the AKL airport isn’t building the bigger facilities needed for the A380 to load/unload. Would be great if AKL would built the facilities. Then SQ might actually put some decent planes on the route. can’t stand the old planes they get away with using and now flying other airlines when going into AKL when normally I would prefer SQ.