Qatar Airways has had great award pricing for short-distance travel on American Airlines and Alaska Airlines. What’s more, their points are easy to come by.
- They have a U.S. credit card
- They are a transfer partner of American Express and Citibank
- You can move British Airways, Aer Lingus, Finnair and Iberia points into Qatar, meaning you can also move Chase, Wells Fargo, Capital One and Bilt points into Qatar via this middleman – and there have been regular transfer bonuses to BA.
Unfortunately, as Dan’s Deals flags, Qatar has devalued these redemptions without notice.
American and Alaska have a separate award chart from other oneworld redemptions (and from Qatar’s own flights, as well as JetBlue). It’s unpublished. However these are the changes:
| Coach | Coach | Business | Business | ||
| Was | Is | Was | Is | ||
| 1 – 650 | 6,000 | 9,500 | 12,500 | 20,000 | |
| 651 – 1151 | 9,000 | 13,000 | 16,500 | 27,000 | |
| 1152 – 2000 | 11,000 | 14,500 | 22,000 | 34,000 | |
| 2001 – 3000 | 13,000 | 16,000 | 38,750 | 43,000 |
Pricing is still lower than what British Airways charges, so an arbitrage opportunity remains. However the value gap has narrowed.
My working model is to assume that the best differences between Avios programs will eventually be narrowed, otherwise savvy travelers will just move points between programs. I’ve been surprised that Iberia redemptions for business class on their own flights have remained so good (eg. Northeast – Madrid for 34,000 points each way). Qatar Airways JetBlue redemptions also haven’t changed.
Bear in mind that Qatar hasn’t been supporting booking American regional jet flights, though if you book mainline and there’s regional on the same route they’ve been able to make a change (for which Qatar charges $25).
Dan notes as well,
You might technically be able to book AA awards within the contiguous U.S. and Canada for just 11K Finnair Avios in economy or 30K in first class, though successfully booking these awards through Finnair has proven elusive. If you’ve managed to do so, please share your experience.
This is a shame, not surprising, but I especially do not like seeing unpublished changes without notice.
Can you stop talking about award or other pricing changes without notice as being “shady”? Airlines are not allowed to talk about future pricing changes before they are made. Its called signaling and its anticompetitive. You are expecting airlines to do something that they are unable, legally, to do.
@Dude – you are 100% wrong here.
Airlines have provided advance notice of mileage award changes for decades.
Delta first came up with this excuse – and it was an excuse – when they were called out for the practice. Only they, too, had long provided advance notice and so had their major competitors. Paid travel is totally different than award travel in this regard.
This seems to be the norm now.
How many day’s notice did BA provide recently?
I recently transferred some BA Avios to Finnair and got nowhere for AA domestic.
These cards (I have Chase BA), really need to offer more meaningful perks to make up for the fact they have less value than they did a month ago. My other card – Chase Southwest (premier I think) has actual benefits for the airline, not just the usual Visa signature car hire benefits they all come with.
“Dude” above is making stuff up. There is no regulation in the US and the EU that prohibits having fixed price award charts and announcing an upcoming award chart change.
The greedy airlines are becoming ever more brazenly sleazy with devaluing the points in customer accounts. And one big way of being a corporate sleazeball in this game is to devalue miles/points without providing customers advanced notice of the changes in award pricing and award rules.
Delta did indeed first put up that phony “legal” excuse for no-prior-notice devaluations, and I was the first to call Delta out on Delta lying about the law at the time. I certainly wasn’t JR’s favorite for doing so — and there is a long story about that too 😉 — but Delta had already gotten in the habit of trying to pull the wool over the customers’ eyes and needed to be called out on that too. Unfortunately, Delta never stopped being the leader in devaluing airline miles/points and now it seems to be expected that airlines will continue engaging in the same kind of sleazy business practice and be able to get away with it with minimal adverse consequences.
Avianca/Lifemiles definitely abused a bunch of its miles buyers in recent days — first with the deliberate tech “glitch” related to their disabling the URL linked to the calendar in the searches, and then the no-notice devaluation of the points for a bunch of business and first class routes. Also, now it seems like Avianca/Lifemiles is more into unilaterally rationing partner airline premium cabin mileage space availability for Lifemiles members. Of course they may try to blame the operating airlines, but that will be deceptive too.
Stop calling unannounced award or pricing adjustments “shady”? Prior to rate changes, airlines cannot discuss them. Signaling disrupts competition. You’re expecting airlines to do what’s illegal.
@geometry dash – see my answer above, that is not correct