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I think I ve read that in addition to releasing availability around 1 year out, QATAR also release additional availability in “waves” throughout the year?
Does anyone have any insight into when these waves happen or are they random if they exist at all? Am interested in UK to Austraila in business for September 25 or March 26. Appreciate missed the 1 year release but is it worth me persevering looking for reward flights or bite the bullet and pay cash?
It depends on your risk appetite, but you should also be prepared to look at irregular European routings, eg from AMS, OSL, CDG, MAN, EDI etc and potentially to a different Australian city as there is often gold to be found if you persevere! You can also book to Singapore or Kuala lumpur and onwards using Avios Malaysian Airlines or Qantas, or just paying cash on a low cost carrier like Scoot from Singapore. Ultimately there are *lots* of ways to get to Australia – if you look hard enough and have the time, you can get there for far less than headline rates!
That being said, if you have a partner, good luck explaining why you’re going from Paris to Perth when you want to go from London to Melbourne… 😉
Should be plenty of seats on the Virgin Australia flights from Doha to the many Oz destinations involved. There were 4 Business released on all flights a couple of months ago when this launched.
https://www.headforpoints.com/2025/01/21/book-australia-with-avios-virgin-australia/
I’d look for the Doha-Oz leg and then try to find a European gateway to get you to Doha. Its probably UK to Doha that is the block.
U.K.-DOH is 7 hours and perfectly doable in economy on a day flight, especially if you can get exit/bulkhead seats. I’d do that over positioning to Europe. Then do the longer leg in business.
Just wondering if you can book 1 leg in economy and then another connecting flight in business all on the same booking? Never tried that. I’m OK with 7 hours in economy on Qatar.
Yes you can, both via BA or QR there should be the option to select each cabin separately, availability permitting.
Thanks I’ll have a play with that as I never realised it was possible and it opens up some interesting possibilities. Every day is a learning day!
Yes you can, both via BA or QR there should be the option to select each cabin separately, availability permitting.
My experience of this has been on the BA site that if you try to mix cabins on QR, the booking will fail. And if you try to mix BA sectors with QR, the price returned is just outrageous.
Mixing cabins and booking on the QR site seems fine, but again once you put a BA flight in the mix, the pricing goes.
I have a PE flight with BA in Oct to Sydney, booked at T-355, I narrowly missed out on the Club seat. I’ve been looking almost daily for BA and QR availability to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane from the UK and found nothing. What is particularly annoying on the Qatar site, is that even if you select premium cabins it will often show ghost availability or when you click through it is economy only. I haven’t looked too much from other departures from other countries because I’d rather stick with PE than have the hassle of flying elsewhere first. First world problems I know but perhaps gives an idea of how little availability there is.
@strickers – maybe add ADL to the list as well, and also look at BHX & possibly MAN as married sector availability is a thing on QR
Thanks, I have looked from time to time from BHX and MAN also, still nothing. Managed to reserve the two seats at the back of the PE cabin, no window but nobody behind us. Should make it bearable, we have a month to recover and this time I haven’t overdone it with changes of accommodation, only six places!
The frustration of trying to find reward availability on Qatar! Just tried MAN/LON/BHX – ADL/SYD/MEL, all combinations, half the time the departure airport didn’t stick when modifying, then the number of passengers changed for 2 to 1 and finally when some availability did appear and you clicked, it disappeared. Can someone much more intelligent than me please write a reward flight finder for Qatar! Rant over.
Have you tried searching via AA in the first instance? It’s not perfect but it might just save an ounce of sanity (and/or throw back some other options).
That’s genuinely useful, thanks, at least now I can make a note of availability to Doha and then only search for onwards. Absolutely nothing the weekend we go, not even in economy at the moment.
You’re welcome!
Thanks for all replies. Very useful. Mind you, seems avios points transfers from BA account to Qatar privilege club are temporarily broken at the moment with no timescale on resolution. So can’t take advantage of any availability quite yet!
If you link your accounts you don’t actually have to transfer the points, though I don’t know if that’s also broken!
Accounts already linked. But QATAR system says I’m short of avios when I tried a test booking even though my combined total is enough. When I was chatting to BA customer service, they said I needed to transfer points to my Qatar privilege account.
Note you can only spend your miles on QR, not the household balance. Would that explain the shortfall.
Your original question about releasing avios availability is that in my experience it’s completely random.
I watched the qatar flights uk to Auckland for last october (2024) after missing the 12-month point. They went from n/a, to double price, to n/a again, to suddenly available at single avios price.
I only wanted the one ticket so got lucky, think it’s based on supply / demand / sales.Thanks for all the comments. Managed to transfer avios from BA to Qatar too. So ready to go if availability comes up.
One glitch is that although the system shows some availability from DOHA to Australia with code share Qatar/virgin, and there is also availability from UK to Doha, the system doesnt show any availability from UK to Australia. Maybe I need to phone the call centre!
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