Booking with Avios on Qatar Airways

[lookofdisdain]

So despite being hailed as the “sweet spot”, it seems availability to AUS/NZ is practically zero unless you want to choose Flexi and pay double the quoted avios? Getting frustrated with the whole thing now, spend years scraping together points and then you can’t use them how you want. Any advice?

[Ladyshopper]

I had similar thoughts to you – I’d been looking earlier this year for them, and all that were being released were the double avios seats. However, in November a whole load of seats were released at the normal avios rate for this coming year, so I was able to book seats out to Auckland and back from Sydney, which I had just about lost hope of being able to do.

I think the key is to just be flexible, keep checking every day, and hope that something similar to the above happens and be able to jump on the opportunity if it arises.

[0 post]

Not sure the period you’re looking at but since Qatar introduced their peak and off peak periods late last year things during the off peak period have massively improved. However during the peak period it seems like on most routes Qatar are only offering ‘flexi/ Q2’ redemptions for double the avios in business.

This means I’ve been finding it relativity easy to get normal price redemptions outside of busy holiday periods, but impossible during holiday periods. E.g have a LHR-AKL business booking for 2 people in early December, there was loads of availability, but as soon as the booking period opened for 12th December onwards there has been nothing since on any day. When the booking period opens for mid-late Jan next year more availability should open up.

Not helpful if you need to travel during school holidays, but it’s still a huge improvement over most of last year.

Otherwise Qatar economy isn’t that bad, did LHR-AKL-LHR in December down the the back, and while not brilliant it was bearable. Plus 90,000 Avios and £300 of fees for a return to NZ in pretty unbeatable. Having done that trip multiple times a year for the past 25 years may have made be numb to it though…

[indiacpapa]

I had a lot of trouble with BKK for Feb. Nothing out of Spain (where I live). Then in late Nov as mentioned a whole load were dumped. They’ve pretty much gone now but occasionally open up. I found it helpful to check each sector individually as if you search eg lhr-akl it doesn’t seem to show if either of your segments have normal availability if the other segment doesn’t.

[Ian m]

We booked business Dublin to auckland in December for February flights. There was availability on most days