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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.


How to earn Avios from UK credit cards

How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (April 2024)

As a reminder, there are various ways of earning Avios points from UK credit cards.  Many cards also have generous sign-up bonuses!

In February 2022, Barclaycard launched two exciting new Barclaycard Avios Mastercard cards with a bonus of up to 25,000 Avios. You can apply here.

You qualify for the bonus on these cards even if you have a British Airways American Express card:

Barclaycard Avios Plus card

Barclaycard Avios Plus Mastercard

Get 25,000 Avios for signing up and an upgrade voucher at £10,000 Read our full review

Barclaycard Avios card

Barclaycard Avios Mastercard

5,000 Avios for signing up and an upgrade voucher at £20,000 Read our full review

There are two official British Airways American Express cards with attractive sign-up bonuses:

British Airways American Express Premium Plus

25,000 Avios and the famous annual 2-4-1 voucher Read our full review

British Airways American Express

5,000 Avios for signing up and an Economy 2-4-1 voucher for spending £15,000 Read our full review

You can also get generous sign-up bonuses by applying for American Express cards which earn Membership Rewards points. These points convert at 1:1 into Avios.

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold

Your best beginner’s card – 20,000 points, FREE for a year & four airport lounge passes Read our full review

The Platinum Card from American Express

40,000 bonus points and a huge range of valuable benefits – for a fee Read our full review

Run your own business?

We recommend Capital on Tap for limited companies. You earn 1 Avios per £1 which is impressive for a Visa card, along with a sign-up bonus worth 10,500 Avios.

Capital on Tap Business Rewards Visa

Huge 30,000 points bonus until 12th May 2024 Read our full review

You should also consider the British Airways Accelerating Business credit card. This is open to sole traders as well as limited companies and has a 30,000 Avios sign-up bonus.

British Airways Accelerating Business American Express

30,000 Avios sign-up bonus – plus annual bonuses of up to 30,000 Avios Read our full review

There are also generous bonuses on the two American Express Business cards, with the points converting at 1:1 into Avios. These cards are open to sole traders as well as limited companies.

American Express Business Platinum

40,000 points sign-up bonus and an annual £200 Amex Travel credit Read our full review

American Express Business Gold

20,000 points sign-up bonus and FREE for a year Read our full review

Click here to read our detailed summary of all UK credit cards which earn Avios. This includes both personal and small business cards.

Comments (45)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • VV says:

    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:

      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:

    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:

      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:

    I cant seem to be able to look up flights with partner airlines, how do you do this?

    • Rob says:

      You’re using ba.com and not avios.com? They will show automatically if seats are available.

  • Andrew says:

    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:

      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:

        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:

          it has been like this since they started flying there in march or whenever

          • darrenf says:

            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:

          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:

            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:

            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:

    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.

  • You Can Now Search, but not book, Qatar awards on BA.com says:

    […] 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:

    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:

      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.

  • Andrew (@andrewseftel) says:

    Shame they don’t fly to AKL. Would have been good to get another OW option there.

    • Lady London says:

      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.

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