Qatar Airways Reward Seat Finder: Sort Of Better, But Still Not Great

In late 2024, Qatar Airways Privilege Club launched “My Reward Seat Finder,” a tool that’s supposed to efficiently show Qatar Airways award availability across an entire year, on your choice of routes. It’s a huge value-add when airlines make it easy to search award availability, so I was excited when this was launched.

As I wrote about at the time, unfortunately the execution of this left a lot to be desired. So there’s some good news, as Qatar Airways has announced that it has made improvements to this feature. However, by fixing one problem, the airline has seemingly created a new problem.

How Qatar Airways’ Reward Seat Finder works

The Qatar Airways Privilege Club program has become increasingly useful over time, both for redemptions on Qatar Airways, and for awards on partner airlines. The airline has made the booking process for awards easier, and Privilege Club is now a program I use all the time.

So, does Qatar Airways’ Reward Seat Finder make booking awards on the airline any easier? The airline markets it as a way to easily search award availability up to one year in advance, allowing you to see all the options for an entire calendar month at a glance.

You can access the Reward Seat Finder at this link. Once logged into your account, you’ll find the search function. You just enter your origin, destination, the month you want to travel, how many travelers there are, and the cabin you’re looking at.

For example, I searched Miami (MIA) to Doha (DOH) for May 2026 in a premium cabin (so business class). When I got to the results page, it showed availability for almost every date.

That sounds great, but here’s the catch — the calendar doesn’t differentiate between the carrier’s Saver awards and the carrier’s Flexi awards, which are twice as expensive.

So in business class, you can’t tell based on the calendar whether you’ll pay 70,000 Avios or 140,000 Avios for your flight, which is kind of a major detail.

The irony is that when this tool first launched, it showed the award cost on the calendar page (in terms of number of Avios required), but didn’t show the correct cabin. So when you searched for premium cabin travel, it would show the cheapest economy award.

Now it shows the correct cabin, but doesn’t tell us how many Avios are required. I wish we’d see a combination of the two systems — show the number of Avios required for the correct cabin searched. I’m not sure if someone actually quality tested this and was like “yep, this looks much better,” if this is a glitch, or what…

These kinds of award tools can be so valuable

I’d absolutely love if Qatar Airways could rework this feature and make it actually useful, as it would be a huge asset to the program. For example, Virgin Atlantic has a similar Reward Seat Checker feature, which is the perfect execution of this concept. It doesn’t require logging in, and it clearly shows the lowest cost for travel in each cabin on each day.

Bottom line

While I appreciate that Qatar Airways is investing in a Reward Seat Finder feature, the execution still leaves a lot to be desired, even after reportedly listening to member feedback.

When this feature first launched, it didn’t correctly display premium cabin awards, so it showed the cheapest economy award, even if you searched for a business class award. Now that problem has been fixed, but a new issue has been created — the calendar correctly shows if there’s business class award availability, but doesn’t indicate if it’s Saver or Flexi (with the latter costing twice as much).

If this could actually work well, it would be an awesome feature. So consider this a gentle nudge to Privilege Club to maybe get this working properly, so that it can be an asset to the program. Third time’s the charm. 😉

What do you make of Qatar Airways’ Reward Seat Finder? Anyone have a different take?