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How to link Qatar Airways Privilege Club and British Airways Executive Club Avios accounts

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We are running three articles today covering the launch of the Qatar Airways Privilege Club and Avios partnership.

Our introductory piece on the benefits of linking our your British Airways Executive Club account to your Qatar Airways Privilege Club account is here.

We have produced this standalone article on how to link your British Airways and Qatar Airways accounts to give us an easy reference point for future articles.

How to link your Qatar Airways Privilege Club and BA Executive Club accounts

How to link your Qatar Airways Privilege Club and BA Executive Club accounts

Linking your Privilege Club and Executive Club accounts is the first step in transferring your Avios from one account to another, and being able to take advantage of the discounted redemptions and new partners that Qatar Airways offers.

The conversion rate is 1:1 and you can move your Avios back and forth, instantly, as many times as you want, for free.

The process is very easy and can be completed in three short steps:

Step 1: sign in to your Privilege Club account

If you don’t already have a Qatar Airways Privilege Club account you need to sign up for one first.

Sign up at this page.

Note that children under 18 cannot join Privilege Club. There is no point altering their date of birth because you cannot link your account to British Airways without a date of birth match.

Once you have an account, head to the Qatar Airways Avios page. Click the ‘link my accounts’ button:

Qatar Avios link account

You are then redirected to another page which lets you link your British Airways Executive Club account. You cannot link an Iberia Plus or Aer Lingus AerClub account.

Make sure your personal details match on both accounts so you can link them smoothly. I am told by Qatar Airways that there must be a match of first name, surname and date of birth.

If you have issues and have a middle name, try putting it in the same field as your first name rather than the ‘middle name’ field. This fixes the issue for some people.

Qatar link your avios accounts

Step 2: log in to your BA Executive Club account

Clicking the button will redirect you to a login page on britishairways.com. You may have to verify your login with two factor authentication.

link your Qatar Airways Privilege Club and BA Executive Club accounts

You are also given a special code that you are told to keep safe in case “you ever need to log in without your device” again. I believe this is a special code you can use if your two-factor authentication device is unavailable.

Step 3: Confirm and check your balance on Privilege Club

Once you’ve done that the process is completed and you return to the Qatar Airways site. You should see your full Avios balance. You can see both my Qatar Airways Avios balance as well as my British Airways Executive Account Avios balance:

Qatar link avios account balance

Linking your accounts does not automatically mean that Privilege Club has access to any Avios in Executive Club. You still need to use the ‘Combine Avios’ tool to shift Avios between the two. This is a free and instantaneous process.

You can move your Avios in either direction, at 1:1, as many times as you like.

Further reading:

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How to earn Avios from UK credit cards (April 2025)

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.

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

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Category

Qatar Airways and Privilege Club

Comments (215)

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

  • Don says:
    24 Mar24 March 10:59

    The Student Club, for anyone under 30 studying, or in my case has a child in that position, looks attractive too.

  • Charlie says:
    24 Mar24 March 11:00

    Hi. I linked my accounts fine yesterday but the extra 2500 avios are yet to appear in my executive club even though it says through qatar that my avios balance is 2500 points higher.
    Anyone else experiencing this?

    • Rob says:
      24 Mar24 March 11:27

      Have you actually transferred them from your Qatar account to your BA account?

      • Charlie says:
        24 Mar24 March 11:49

        No I didn’t know to do that, just thought it automatically went together. I’ll look at that now, thankyou

        • Charlie says:
          24 Mar24 March 11:55

          How do you transfer the 2500 from Qatars website to the BAEC? Cannot for the life of me figure that out

          • Rob says:
            24 Mar24 March 12:05

            That would be the ‘Combine Avios’ button on the Qatar site 🙂

  • Felipe says:
    24 Mar24 March 11:16

    I tried to do it but Qatar doesn’t allow spaces in the surname. My surname has 3 words, they allow only one space, not two. Then, if I put just my last name, it doesn’t match with British Airways one, which I can’t change because it also must match my password name!

    • Felipe says:
      24 Mar24 March 11:28

      I tried calling them at +974 4023 0000 twice to change my surname but they just send me to the Privilege Team and the line ends, I’m also paying 26c per minute on each call… This is very bad…

    • Felipe says:
      24 Mar24 March 11:38

      Tried to also use middle name + last name to have my full surname, which actually shows properly in Qatar but can’t combine avios still because they send the last name to compare, not middle + last.

      • Christian says:
        24 Mar24 March 13:15

        I called them and had to submit a ticket with the screengrabs from my BA account. This is being sent to the offline back office team to manually link the two accounts as there was no dispute the details were the same. They told me that it can take up to 24 hours for new privilege accounts to be fully activated.

  • Steve says:
    24 Mar24 March 12:00

    I am tying to register my children for PC but system does not allow registration for under 18s apparently. They are already part of BA household account so it would be good to get another 5000 avios for free! Is there a way round?

  • Mark M says:
    24 Mar24 March 12:37

    Can you ask BA simply to remove your middle names from their record. They are optional on Qatar, so that would eliminate any discrepancy….

    • Felipe says:
      24 Mar24 March 12:41

      Thanks Mark but I don’t have middle names, my surname is 3 words. This is common for 99% of Latin Americans…

      • neuromancer says:
        24 Mar24 March 15:10

        I’ve registered my wife everywhere with only one given name and one surname, out of the six total, had not had any problems whatsoever. I also buy tickets with the same two names, as usually the fields are not large enough anyway.
        No problem with having only a part of the name in the ticket or accounts.

        • Felipe says:
          24 Mar24 March 18:24

          The problem is when you have a BA Amex credit card, it must match your full name otherwise you will have issues with Credit Score etc…

          • John says:
            24 Mar24 March 21:03

            Not true, and credit “scores” don’t mean anything in the UK.

  • Felipe says:
    24 Mar24 March 13:16

    BA has my correct surname… It’s Qatar who can’t deal with it… It doesn’t allow two spaces in the Last Name field. But BA does.

  • Felipe says:
    24 Mar24 March 13:46

    I’m in a call with Qatar and it looks like they can’t solve the issue. They can’t allow more than one space in the surname. I guess every single Latin American person will never be able to link their account to the British Airways one.

    • Rob says:
      24 Mar24 March 14:31

      Might be why this is a BA and not Iberia deal then 🙂

      • Felipe says:
        24 Mar24 March 19:02

        Yep, UK doesn’t want any European here right?

      • Mariola says:
        27 Mar27 March 23:28

        But there’s Latin American and Spanish people who use British Airways and Qatar airlines… not sure what you’re suggesting here?

        • Rhys says:
          28 Mar28 March 08:18

          That linking to Iberia has been delayed since Iberian users are more likely to have more problems linking their account to Qatar Airways. Clearly this is a problem that needs an IT solution before Qatar opens the floodgates

  • EOC says:
    24 Mar24 March 13:59

    Qatar struggles don’t bode well going forward. My surname has an apostrophe as in O’. You cant enter an apostrophe in the Qatar surname entrydata box so forget that route, You just get thingBA no surname match comes up. Like others I called the Privilege Club with BA like levels of uselessness. Where do I go from here?

    • Rob says:
      24 Mar24 March 14:30

      Down to the deed poll office ….

      • Mark says:
        24 Mar24 March 15:28

        Going to be a bit of queue of people trying to get Qatar Airways conformant names I reckon 🙂

    • Max says:
      24 Mar24 March 15:15

      Same problem here. I contacted their support team. They replied that they don’t support “special characters” in surnames.

    • Martin says:
      24 Mar24 March 20:07

      Likewise I have O’ in my name and it will not link – 2 accounts now set up for myself and wife both which will not link……Great I have orphaned random Avios. As well as South American surnames it looks like the Irish will struggle!

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