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Qatar Airways reverses the bulk of its Avios fee increase

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Qatar Airways has swiftly reversed the bulk of the sharp increase in Avios taxes and charges added on Saturday night.

There always was a plan to increase taxes and charges, but somewhere down the line it appears that a mistake was made and the fees raised far higher than was intended.

This is not the first time that Qatar Airways has suffered IT issues of this nature.

Qatar Airways reverses the bulk of its Avios fee increase

On Sunday afternoon, Qatar Airways told us:

Qatar Airways Privilege Club sincerely apologises for any inconvenience our valued members may have faced during the rollout of our revised reward fees policy earlier today. The reward fees that were displayed for booking Qatar Airways award flights were higher than intended. The issue has since been resolved and the correct reward fees, as per the revised policy, are now being reflected and applied for all Qatar Airways award flight bookings.

Qatar Airways Privilege Club has transitioned our reward fees policy for redeeming Qatar Airways award flights from a sector-based model to a distance-based structure, effective today. Reward fees have decreased up to 15% or remained unchanged for several of our most popular short and medium-haul routes while others have increased representative of the distance travelled.

What does this mean in practice?

Let’s go back to our examples from Sunday morning.

This is Heathrow to Brisbane, priced a few months ago for an earlier HfP article:

Qatar Airways reverses the bulk of its Avios fee increase

As you can see, you were paying £613 plus 180,000 Avios for a return flight in Business Class.

Here is the same route price on Satuday night:

Qatar Airways reverses the bulk of its Avios fee increase

Taxes and charges were £563 per person, return, higher at £1,176.

Here is the revised position as of Sunday afternoon:

Qatar Airways reverses the bulk of its Avios fee increase

Taxes and charges are down to £793, which is ‘just’ £180 return higher than it was.

Here is more pricing. Bangkok was £899 return in Business Class on Sunday morning:

Qatar Airways reverses the bulk of its Avios fee increase

This is now down to £623 (we don’t know what the cost was last week for comparison):

Qatar Airways reverses the bulk of its Avios fee increase

If you start your trip in Dublin and not Heathrow this comes down to €429 (£361).

A return Business Class trip to Doha which was £479 on Sunday morning in Business Class:

Qatar Airways reverses the bulk of its Avios fee increase

…. is unchanged. You will still pay £479, although you can cut this to €267 (£224) if you start in Dublin.

So …. in conclusion …. things are worse than they were last week, but nowhere near as bad as they were yesterday morning.

More importantly, the bulk of routes are still cheaper (ignoring Amex voucher redemptions) on Qatar Airways than on British Airways, and availability and route network is far better.

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Category

Qatar Airways and Privilege Club

Comments (56)

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

  • Michael C says:
    16 Sep16 September 06:40

    Backsies – no swapsies!

  • KyaCat says:
    16 Sep16 September 06:57

    Still enough to put me off from using Qatar regularly

  • Geoggy says:
    16 Sep16 September 07:10

    Take a tip from me. If you use AwardWallet, delete Qatar from it.

    I’m “under investigation” with no access to Privilege club after repeated OTP were issued but not used.

    The airline of the year are not easy to deal with when it comes to IT issues.

    • Thomas says:
      16 Sep16 September 07:57

      I have the same issue at the moment! Not finding it easy or quick to resolve, not sure why it happened either

    • BBbetter says:
      16 Sep16 September 08:22

      Take a tip from me. Delete the AwardWallet app.

      Its not just a password disaster waiting to happen. Any airlines that allow access to such bots is a huge risk.

      • BJ says:
        16 Sep16 September 08:58

        Agreex, never trusted it. Even if I did it would just have made me forget all my passwords and make me lazy to check sites if various schemes.

      • Tetly1967 says:
        16 Sep16 September 13:36

        In the same situation as @Geoggy and @Thomas. But still rate AwardWallet and will continue to use it (but will disable checking for Qatar if I can ever get my access back).

      • Super Secret Stuff says:
        16 Sep16 September 15:58

        Agree, it’s why I’ve never used it. A basic principle of online security is lock down your accounts to only you, shouldn’t give out unnecessary access (ever).if you want to know the balance, just log in and look!

        • Track says:
          18 Sep18 September 02:28

          What a pile of rubbish. An average collector has > 20-30 accounts, if you count all the airlines, Nectars and Neros, etc

          It will take a days work to log in and check.

    • Sharka says:
      16 Sep16 September 13:22

      I have the same issue, and their service is truly awful. You wonder if there is some undisclosed data breach given their rapid locking of accounts.

      You get passed from call centre to call centre, and they want you to send passport copies outside the jurisdiction (they were very confused when I asked about data protection concerns). The Indian call centre cannot see the email you send to the Qatar call centre and they cannot transfer the call: their suggestion was to call repeatedly until you got where you needed to be to follow up.

      No other airline has issues with Awardwallet: the problem is not with Awardwallet, but very much with Qatar Airways. Once on the ground, its service is truly awful.

  • AJA says:
    16 Sep16 September 07:25

    So the “good “news is that prices have increased but not as much as they wanted to do so.

    I wonder if they’d have reversed the increases from Saturday night if no one had kicked up so much?

    And the only reason the availability and network is better than BA is because they actually fly to places in Asia and Australia that BA used to fly to but have stopped because BA cannot fly over Russia because of ‘lack of demand”. And BA can just funnel passengers onto Qatar flights. And more pertinently BA is focusing on flying to 6 more US destinations – yippee ki yay!

    • BJ says:
      16 Sep16 September 07:39

      I think it was your comments that did the trick AJA so you should be feeling happier this morning 🙂

    • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:
      16 Sep16 September 08:42

      BA doesn’t fly over Russia because the Russian government banned it (along with many other airlines) from doing so.

      It wasn’t BAs decision due to “lack of demand”

      • chris1922 says:
        16 Sep16 September 08:53

        What a strange comment from AJA ! I can’t imagine there is much demand to fly over Russia from anyone at the moment !

        • Rhys says:
          16 Sep16 September 08:58

          Plenty of demand if you are an airline from a country Russia is friendly with 🙂

        • riku says:
          16 Sep16 September 10:16

          There is “demand” from Chinese airlines who still take the shorter route over Russia from China – Europe or China – USA. But if there is a problem onboard you might find yourself spending some time at a Russian airport!!

      • AJA says:
        16 Sep16 September 16:44

        Apologies all.

        I meant to write BA cannot fly over Russia AND because of ‘lack of demand”. They seem to think that it’s fine to route passengers onto Qatar via Doha than to open up more routes to Asia.

        It’s logical from their perspective as they get to utilitise an aircraft on lucrative transatlantic routes and get code-share revenue from QR. Unfortunately it doesn’t leave much choice for customers to fly on BA to the far east.

    • TC says:
      16 Sep16 September 10:07

      BA does not fly over Russia due to “lack of demand”

      I am not sure where you get your information from.

      I am not sure if you watch the news or not but a couple of years ago Russia invaded a country called Ukraine (have you heard of it?) and that is the reason there is a no-fly zone over Russia.

    • QFFlyer says:
      16 Sep16 September 11:23

      BA still fly to SYD, and haven’t flown to anywhere else in Australia for a long time.

    • TGLoyalty says:
      16 Sep16 September 12:01

      Generally how alliances work too AJA.

      You don’t fly everywhere in the word you use the planes of others that do.

      The ban is reciprocated between Russia and Europe/USA usual political tit for tat. Before people start screaming but war etc there’s worse going on in Gaza but they happily fund the bombing of more innocent civilians.

  • Greenpen says:
    16 Sep16 September 10:56

    It is not a no fly zone. It would not be possible to try to do that to Russia without dire consequences that would upset frequent flying and hotel stays for quite some while; way worse than QR’s new fees or “lite” fares.

    It is part of the Russian response to Europe and USA banning Russian flights over their countries. Reciprocal response.

  • Brian says:
    16 Sep16 September 13:41

    Looks like they don’t have any plans any time soon to let us use the Companion voucher with QR?

  • Talay says:
    16 Sep16 September 14:16

    Another observation last week was that if you went looking for MAN-DOH (or onward from DOH) then you got a fully scrollable matrix of reward costs (or cash fares) against the antiquated version you see if you see if you looked at LHR-DOH (or onward from DOH).

    I have seen this briefly appear from when looking at other airport pairs but not from the UK.

    I don’t know if this is a test of new software but it was hugely beneficial when searching against the absolutely horrific, day by day search you have to do now.

  • John says:
    16 Sep16 September 15:54

    Feeling left out from the surcharge comparison bandwagon so I will just add that I booked a KWI-HKG in J for 55k avios + KWD 61.7 in July.

    The new new price is KWD 66.7 (about £12 increase), don’t know what the old new price was.

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

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