Qatar Airways has launched another batch of ‘2 for 1’ business class deals from the UK. These are well priced but are only valid when two people travel together.
You need to book these before 17th May for return travel from 15th May to 10th December.
You can find some sample fares and book here although availability is often tricky to find. You may want to check out pricing from EU boarding points such as Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Oslo and Frankfurt as they are running the same offer and fares are even more attractive.
The headline fares are, to be honest, higher than you would pay in a standard Qatar sale. However, once you divide them by two to get the ‘per person’ price under this 241 offer, they are very attractive.
Out of London, Bangkok at £1,650 per person looks pretty good. Perth is £2,375 each. Dubai is good value at £1,600. Cape Town at £1,800 is an excellent price if you can find it for the start of their Summer season later in the year.
Out of, say, Amsterdam, though, the deals are outstanding (yet again). Bangkok, as a random example, comes up as €2,165 in October for TWO people. That is just £780 each, business class, return!
Remember that you will also earn British Airways tier points and Avios (125% of flown miles in business) with Qatar. On longer routes you would earn 560 tier points in business class – 140 for the flight to Doha and 140 for your onward flight (if over 2,000 miles) each way. The Bangkok trip above would earn 560 tier points in British Airways Executive Club – very nearly enough for Silver status.
The best thing to do is to visit the sale page here and play around the destinations and European starting points. Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Oslo and Frankfurt are good places to start.
Remember that you need to book for 2 people or multiples of 2 people. You won’t see these prices if you just search for a price for one person.
Do not just look at price. Remember that the Boeing 787 (reviewed here), A380 and A350 services have the latest business class seat. The Boeing 777 (reviewed here) has an older but still fully flat seat. The A330 and A340 services have sloping business class seats. You should also consider the flight times, given that you will need to book a connecting flight to and from the UK and may want to avoid paying for hotels.
About Head for Points
Hi Rob, I mentioned this in an alert on the day your Kaligo offer came out. Suggested you mentioned it that day. Thought it would be good if people wanted to tie in their bargain QR flight with the Kaligo offer. We have done so, and it’s a very good deal holiday this October coming. Amazing sales around. Almost makes up for the hassle of collecting avios, for the moment, anyway. Long may these sales last ESP as their J product is def on par with BA F.
Grrr i need to travel alone – i missed the half price sale. Hopefully this will return shortly.
We single travellers need to have some kind of buddy system for these fares!
Good Idea! We can start HFP companion services LTD!
I’ll happily let anyone pay me to accompany them 🙂
Some good prices from Madrid too … e.g. to Singapore 1465 euros (so about 1060 GBP) per person and on 787 to DOH and 350 DOH-SIN
Grief. My wife is off to Singapore on Monday (on SQ) and the ticket is £3,100 semi-flex (and the Qatar tickets are technically semi-flex as they can be changed for £300 plus fare difference).
Rob, Shame you weren’t able to go to Sin via AMS or CPH on QR J? I know you are booked on SQ, was it just too short a time frame? It would be a bit of an adventure for you all. Def better than all the miles you needed for SQ. Those Q R fares not bad at all, and BTW it’s only $300 change fee, so effectively only £180 change fee. We can live with that.
Taking a 4-year old and 7-year old on an 8 day holiday …. they really don’t need to be put through 3 flights to get there!
at least you the nanny:-) lucky her travelling the world!
Ironically, she is leaving us in September because she decided that she hasn’t seen enough of the world (which is true, she’d never left Europe until we took her to Dubai which is odd these days for someone in their late-20’s). She is becoming a ‘holiday nanny’ via an agency, doing 1-2 week ’24 x 7′ stints with gaps in between.
WOW!
German?
Some of Qatar’s A332s have been refurbished with a 787 style J cabin as well by the way, but it is a bit of a lottery which one you get on the day.
IIRC I read someplace this was deployed on the KUL rotation that continues on to HKT. Polly may know more as I believe she is booked on that.
You know, it used to stop for an hour or so in KUL on route each way to HKT to change pax, but now they seem to have a separate flight to KUL . I checked my flight no but it’s different to the direct KUL one. Nice planes on all sectors, but they may switch them round, hope not.
An important caveat on this comment: “The Bangkok trip above would earn 560 tier points in British Airways Executive Club – very nearly enough for Silver status.”
Don’t forget that for Silver, you also need 4 eligible flights. The Bangkok flights will not count towards this, as you need to make 4 cash flights on BA or Iberia (I believe). I made this mistake, and priced the benefit of silver status in to the Qatar flight. The extra 4 BA flights cost me about £400 in total, which wiped out the benefit of the silver status!
You could have nipped up to Manchester and back, twice, which would have been massively cheaper – especially if you used ‘part pay with Avios’!
This is true… but Munich is nicer than Manchester! I’m also short of time – I can only fly on weekends and most of those are busy, but I did consider spending a Sunday doing 2 return flights to Manchester, but I didn’t have the heart to spend money on a waste of a day, so I spent a bit more on flights to places I actually wanted to go to.
Of course, the best way to use up some of the flights would be to fly with BA to Amsterdam and back to connect the flights to Bangkok. At the time, you could do one leg in CE and one in ET for less than £200 total (which gave you the 40 tier points you needed, and two bags in the hold for a lowly Blue), but by the time I came around to booking it, it had jumped to almost £400 and I’m not paying that for a short flight with BA!
One other point I suppose: I booked my flights when I got 10 tier points per economy flight. That is now 5. So, for people looking for 4 BA flights and 40 tier points today, they will need to book CE for one of them, which pushes the cost up again.
Now I just need this next year so I can fly over to Bangkok in June 2016!
Raffles this is another reason I don’t value BAPP 241 that highly anymore.
With so many frequent sales from Qatar only costing £300-400 more than an avios booking (largely offset by getting TP and miles back) then I find that with the exception of a few routes (like CPT/JNB) and specific times (if you are extremely flexible with the destination) then 241 is actually not that great of a deal.
I actually find that (if you are willing not to fly business class everywhere) that the value that you could get out of the Virgin companion voucher can compare to the 241.
Assuming that Qatar, Virgin etc. fly to your desired destination.
So pretty much everywhere and with better chance of availability than redeeming a 241
Just snagged AMS-(DOH)-BKK-(DOH)-CPH in business for £788 each. AMS/CPH legs are B787, the DOH-BKK section are A380.
This, and our trip to HNL in the summer will get us to BA gold for about £1800 total each. 🙂
With gold in the bag, next year will be about burning the Avios!
Thanks Raffles!
ee you could have done a lot more to warn us off the banks imploding 2007-8