Lowest ever Qatar Airways UK Business prices (Perth £1,425) but you risk NO BA tier points

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• Passy777 says:

  20 Apr20 April 07:36

  As you suggested in your post, the UK sale initially did not have the desired impact. Do you think that the ambiguity relating to earning TP”s and avios with BA could be a contributing factor to the apparent lethargy?

  • Raffles says:

    20 Apr20 April 08:32

    It is certainly true of HFP readers but we are not typical.

    I was with hotels.com this week. Last year, you may remember, they did a one day promo for double Hotels.com Rewards credit. Apparently it was a major flop ….. except amongst HFP readers, where it was ludicrously popular!

    • Scallder says:

      20 Apr20 April 09:35

      I’ve had emails offering those at least twice so far this year. Managed to use one so am getting 4 nights for a 2 night stay for a weekend in May. Rather annoyingly they were both minimum 2 night stay so could utilise the other one

      • Scallder says:

        20 Apr20 April 13:07

        *couldn’t

    • Brian W says:

      20 Apr20 April 13:38

      It was certainly popular with me……..I had to cancel the hotel I booked using that promo as my plans changed but I surprisingly still got the extra bonus night awarded to my account despite the room being cancelled! If they run the promo again I’ll be booking multiple rooms that can be cancelled 🙂

    • JamesWag says:

      20 Apr20 April 18:27

      Hee hee, I got two free nights from that promo instead of one:-)

      Cheers HFP !

• Phillip says:

  20 Apr20 April 08:12

  BA can see when a ticket was booked, the dates are digitally stamped all over the booking. However, I would say more than the booking date, it’s the issuing date that is more important. When booking tickets online, through airlines or the expedias of the world, tickets are issued fairly instantly. It’s when a ticket number is issued, which essentially means the airline has been paid. When booking through an agent, say Trailfinders, they can put the flight on hold but not issue the ticket for a few days, depending on the flexibility that the airline is affording them. IF QR allow then to hold the ticket beyond 1 May, then the issue date is likely to trigger the tier point generation rather than when things were put on hold. I may put something on hold to test how long they can hold it for and what the current point collection shows as in MMB.

  I wouldn’t be surprised if BA stick to the “rule”. It’s easy to do. It’s automated. In the same way that post devaluation, tickets booked before earned with the old rates, even if flown 10 months post devaluation. There are many digital stamps on a ticket that mean BA can enforce it if they want to. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the timing of the sale is such so that BA doesn’t have to give out all the Avios for the cheap tickets on QR.

  • James67 says:

    20 Apr20 April 09:59

    Thanks Philip, very helpful comment. I used to have a great TA when I lived down south but these days do everything online myself, shows potentil value of good TA relationship though.

  • Martin says:

    20 Apr20 April 14:41

    This info is true IF (and a big if) BAEC receive all this info from QR as it is them that ticket your booking. I would have thought all BAEC would receive from QR is date and flights flown and a BAEC number, it’s all they really need.

  • Jake says:

    20 Apr20 April 20:57

    Seats can be held until ticketing deadline (sometimes weeks away), but the fare isnt held. So the fare can increase. The fare will usually only hold until midnight of the day it is booked. Depends on the airline.

    • Phillip says:

      21 Apr21 April 08:21

      BAEC will receive the ticket number from QR – the issue date is the one thing they pick up on from the ticket number. There are two ways they can do this. They are able to flag the batch of tickets that were issued prior to 1 May. So the system will then recognise that any ticket numbered before ticket number XXX-XXXXXXXXXX was issued prior to 1 May and therefore not eligible for miles/tier points. Or, they can do it on a ticket by ticket basis. The reason for airlines having to change their reservation systems when joining an alliance to match the rest of the alliance, makes things like this very simple. It’s a simple, single command. The amount of information that is held electronically via the ticket number is vast and simple to access without needing a person to do it manually.

      The ticketing deadline is for a particular fare. Whether it’s on Galileo, Amadeus or Sabre, once a fare is quoted and stored, the airline will give a ticketing deadline. Some airlines only allow hours, others allow weeks. If the ticketing deadline is missed, both the fare and the seat are lost. It is possible that a fare can be held beyond the sale end date, if the airline permits. Once the sale finishes, however, you can only purchase what has been on hold. You cannot make any changes because the fare will no longer be available. This is true for published fares; these are the fares that we can all buy online from airlines direct or online travel agents. High street travel agents may have special contracted fares with an airline with their own ticketing conditions, which could be different to those of the published fares.
      I think everything is possible, however, if someone is purchasing the ticket for the tier points, I think it’s a big risk.

• James says:

  20 Apr20 April 09:03

  I contacted BA over Twitter about this and their response was:

  “Sorry if there has been any confusion over this. This is due to the agreement we have with Qatar Airways as part of oneworld alliance. I can confirm it is by booking date and not by travel date. I hope this reassures you.”

  Therefore it looks like they intend on only awarding for bookings on/after 1st May sadly.

• ponti says:

  20 Apr20 April 09:10

  I flew QR OSL-BKK during the last for sale, which was great!

  Like another poster above, I am trying to get to Asia in June in business. AY ex-Europe prices around £1200 and BA around the same. Some Turkish pops up at that price too. Besides Chengdu, has anyone found ex-Europe deals at or below £1000 to Asia? Please share as I am not tempted by this QR sale given the TP and avios issues flagged above.

  • James says:

    20 Apr20 April 09:31

    I’ve been looking ex-eu for about 2 weeks now and I haven’t been able to find anything lower than about £1100.

• zaza says:

  20 Apr20 April 09:30

  Off topic, but does anybody know how to let BA know that their Reward Availability is borked for Sri Lanka and Maldives? If you try it on the map, it only works for Maldives Economy, otherwise it breaks the map widget and you have to reload the page. If you do an availability search, even full year, you get a message saying “No availability”. I find this hard to believe to these destinations. If you do the same for eg Sydney, where there really is never any availability, you get a different screen showing each month and that there is no availability. So I think the Sri Lanka and Maldives searches are broken.

  • Lebron James says:

    20 Apr20 April 09:45

    zaza

    the reward map should be taken with pinch of salt, it is very out of date – one example, you can not view First availability to Rio, so one would assume that ba operate no first cabin on that route. however they restarted first on this route about 2 years ago.

    could give you about 10 other examples but wont bore you.

    use the Flight Finder function instead, far better

    • zaza says:

      20 Apr20 April 10:02

      Agreed….I just called Customer Services and they confirmed that the map is flaky. They don’t even fly direct to Sri Lanka any more, hence the lack of availability. As for the Maldives, they do have availability in economy but zero in Business or First. The difference with Sydney is that at some point in the year, there is a single seat available and so the map and finder show you all the months, although searching for two seats will show you no availability at all. Searching the same in Maldives fails completely because there isn’t even a single seat available.

      If only I wanted to go to Bangalore or Chengdu for 2 weeks……….

      • Lebron James says:

        20 Apr20 April 10:56

        yeap

        for some reason, there is always plenty of availability if you want to winter in Almaty

        🙂

        • Graeme says:

          20 Apr20 April 11:28

          Been there in the Summer – it’s actually a very nice place!

  • Mrs_Fussy says:

    20 Apr20 April 13:36

    Agreed – but has previously worked when I try accessing via laptop

• Tom says:

  20 Apr20 April 10:13

  Could I credit this flight to my Qantas frequent flyer program instead of BA? Would I get tier points and miles?

  • Matthew says:

    20 Apr20 April 11:22

    You wouldn’t earn anything from Qantas on Qatar R class either.

    See https://www.qantas.com/fflyer/dyn/flying/airline-earning#qr

    • Tom says:

      20 Apr20 April 12:17

      Thanks

• AliC says:

  20 Apr20 April 11:44

  Slightly OT – I purchased an ex-Europe “fully flex” QATAR ticket in a sale late last year and have just requested a refund because it turns out it was not really fully flex at all.
  According to QATAR, fully flex means that there is no date change fee BUT any fare difference is payable. Since the sale I took advantage of has never been repeated, I cant change at all without paying (a very sizeable) fare difference.
  Nothing in the t+c specifies that a fare difference might apply.
  I wonder if QATAR applies the same logic to these fares ? The t+c state:
  “15.Changes (Business Class): Permitted on outbound / inbound travel at a charge of 300 USD”
  … I fear that in reality, the amount payable to change dates would be much higher once a fare difference is added !
  Surely people don’t pay the premium for a fully flex ticket just to save the 300 USD change fee – I thought I was paying for the ability to lock in a ticket price and have full flexibility?

  • Phillip says:

    20 Apr20 April 14:44

    What booking class did the Fully Flex ticket book into? Usually, sale fares are in restricted classes.

  • Sussex Bantam says:

    20 Apr20 April 16:25

    Fully flex generally means you can cancel at no extra cost – not that you can swap to a higher price flight – that would be a good deal indeed !!

    • AliC says:

      20 Apr20 April 23:47

      It was a J class ticket. I would have expected to be able to change to any other date on which J class was available (within the ticket validity).

• Susan says:

  20 Apr20 April 13:12

  BA may not be flexible about allowing the tier points but one would hope that anyone from QR’s sales/marketing department is keeping an eye on HFP. An extension of sales dates to beyond 1 May could add significant volumes of bookings;-)

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