Questions and Answers

Hi all,

Long time fan. Last year I went on a trip to S Africa via Qatar on an AA biz award. Tons of Friday/Saturday award availability last year.

I’m planning a trip for July 2017 at approximately 330 days out. I’m noticing now via BA.com that there is no availability on any US routes on Friday, Saturday or Sundays. This seems to be common for any date even closer in. Any word if this is hopefully a glitch or has Qatar decided to no longer release awards to partners on weekend dates?

Thanks!

Grab what you can now especially if looking to use AA miles.

QR is in the process of instituting the SQ-like block for all partner redemptions in premium cabins, and it will start from AA/BA and long haul routes first. I bet shortly.

Darn. That’s a bummer to hear. Thank you for the feedback. I really appreciate it.

[FONT=Times New Roman][SIZE=5]I booked CPT-DOH-LHR on QR for May next year. It’s a weekend flight from CPT. The CPT-DOH route was available almost everyday, multiple seats. I got a 380 to LHR which wasn’t as frequent but 777/787/A330 to LHR was open as was space to North America from DOH.

Next 7/16, a Sunday, QR has 4 J seats on CPT-DOH and 4 J seats on both their JNB-DOH flights. Reverse it, same thing.

The odd thing is I had a difficult time booking it with AA reservations. While I could see the award space on KVS and BA.com multiple AA agents said it wasn’t available. In fact I had to try 4 times for one segment, place it on hold then work on the 2nd segment. Reminded me of the EY issue last winter when the agents couldn’t see those rewards. But finally I got an agent who you could tell knew his stuff and found everything no problem. The fact I called on the weekend might have had something to do with it.

As far as Spoiled Brat’s comment, I have no reason to doubt what he says. Yet a couple things don’t support that. 1. QR has just increased their equity in BA’s parent 2. AA has made the exception to fly through Doha to Africa where you can’t fly Etihad or anyone other than BA. If they didn’t want to release reward space to partners why would they be further committing to OneWorld. SQ on the other hand actually releases a lot of premium space to *A, you just can’t see it. You can find space to Asia/Australia/Jakarta(in First)/Bangkok/Hong Kong/PVG/Seoul all the time. Never premium A380 but 777 no problem. And this was the intent of the Alliances in the first place, to provide regional connections, not the long haul. So maybe QR reduces or eliminates rewards on North America routes to DOH, but you can still fly AA/BA to Europe then transit through Doha to Africa. But what QR is doing is all speculation on my part.

I did find it Interesting, in order to search for QR rewards on their site you have to have enough miles in their program just to search.[/SIZE][/FONT]