By far one of the things that most frustrates me about the AAdvantage program is spending miles. American for whatever reason makes it incredibly difficult to search for award space on most partner airlines. I suspect this is because they want their members redeeming American miles for flights on American. After all, by doing this American doesn’t have to buy inventory from partner airlines.
This is incredibly frustrating to me because I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve searched award flight city pairings only to find no availability. Well, that is, no availability on American’s website. That’s when I remember if I want to find award space to Asia, I need to use Qantas’ website to search for space and for Europe, Middle East, and India I need to use British Airways. After searching either Qantas, British Air, or Etihad I can usually come up with an award routing that works. From there, I have to call American and feed them every flight one by one and hope that they can see the space too. Ultimately, it makes it fairly difficult to book complex international itineraries with AAdvantage miles.
Qatar Airways Award Space Is Now Bookable On American’s Website
Thankfully, American made this whole process a bit easier today. Today American began allowing AAdvantage members to see and book award space on Qatar Airways directly from American’s website. This is fantastic news because it opens up a ton of transatlantic flight options on Qatar Airways’ excellent business class.
Now, for just 70,000 AAdvantage miles you can fly this across the Atlantic. In the past American really only showed British Airways award space. While British Airways frequently offers award seats they also charge an absurd amount of fuel surcharges. In most cases, fuel surcharges on premium cabins flights cost around $1,000 each way. Qatar Airways on the other hand only charges about $7.64 in taxes/fees.
How To Book A Qatar Airways Award Ticket
Booking Qatar Airways award space is as simple as booking any other AAdvantage award ticket online. Begin by searching for citing parings on American’s homepage. Make sure to select the “redeem miles” box above the search boxes.
After selecting your city paring and dates click on the search button. From there, you will find a listing of dates and available cabins.
As you can see, there is ample business class award space between Chicago and Doha, but the non-stop Qatar Airways flight is only offered on certain days at this time. Once you find a date that works for you and offers the fight you want select the flight in the center of the page and click continue.
From there you’ll reach a summary page with a total number of miles required and cash co-pay. As you can see, flights in business class on Qatar Airways are very reasonably priced.
Prices are incredibly reasonable when you factor in that the above example features Qatar’s 77W with QSuites which is arguably the best business class in the world.
If you plan on booking Qatar Airways business class with AAdvantage miles I’d recommend booking a flight with QSuites. QSuites can be found on Qatar’s 77W and A350-1000 aircraft. That being said, you can’t go wrong with their business class product on the Boeing 787, A350-900, or A380. However, I would avoid the 77L variant if possible. The 77L isn’t terrible, but it’s just not quite as nice as business class offered on newer aircraft.
Final Thoughts
I’m quite pleased by this change. It always frustrates me that in order to find the perfect award flight I often have to visit 3 different airline websites to search. With this change it’s obviously easier to book Qatar Airways flights with American, but more importantly it’s now easier to see what’s available. By adding Qatar Airways to the award search results it makes it so much easier to plan future trips that include legs on Qatar Airways which route through Doha. So given that, I’m very excited by this improvement.
It’s worth noting that American appears to now also be displaying award availability for SriLankan and Air Tahiti Nui (which recently took delivery of a 787!). However, American still does not display Cathay Pacific or JAL award availability for transpacific flights. Overall though this is a positive change which hopefully leads to a trend of showing all OneWorld partner airlines award availability in the future.
(H/T Lucky @ OneMileAtATime)
