Qatar Airways Privilege Club now partners with Philippine Airlines for mileage-earning and redemption. You can use Qatar’s points for Philippine Airlines flights online.
- It’s easy to get Qatar Airways points. Many credit card programs transfer directly. For those that don’t, move the points to British Airways and from BA to Qatar.
- I’ve been writing for over a decade about how good award availability is on Philippine Airlines. There have been only a few decent ways to book the seats which has meant almost no competition. That’s likely to change.
- Pricing isn’t cheap, but it’s a new good way to get all over Asia with your points.
Qatar does not publish a Philippine Airlines award chart. Points prices are distance-based. LA – Manila will run 110,000 points each way in business class. Manila – New York JFK will cost 154,500 points. But taxes and fees are a very reasonable ~ $200. And they fly:
- Los Angeles 2x daily
- San Francisco 1x daily
- Honolulu 5x weekly
- New York JFK 3x weekly
- Seattle 5x weekly
- Chicago 3x weekly starting November 9
The new A350-1000 is the aircraft to want, with 42 business class suites with doors. The A350-900 is fine. There are multiple configurations of the 777-300ERs including with angled seats. But the point here is that availability can be great, and there aren’t other current viable ways of getting these seats besides the new Qatar partnership.
U.S. frequent flyers don’t generally have access to large quanities of Philippine Airlines Mabuhay Miles. ANA (Amex transfer partner) used to allow redemptions by phone, but these were generally suspended. An Alaska Airlines partnership has been announced but isn’t live yet – and should offer better pricing.
American Airlines has a partnership that doesn’t include redemption. If they’re partnering with Qatar and Alaska, though, I have to expect something with American at some point or eventual oneworld membership. But this has seemed like it could happen for the last seven years.
You can transfer points to Qatar Airways from: American Express Membership Rewards; Bilt Rewards; Capital One; Citi ThankYou Rewards.
And you can transfer to British Airways Avios and then on to Qatar from: Chase Ultimate Rewards, Wells Fargo Rewards, and Diners Club Rewards.
Both BA and Qatar accounts have to be linked, the account-linking feature is only available 30 days after account creation, the first name, last name, date of birth, and email must match. BA household account members over 18 can link to Qatar but can move only their own individual Avios balance. If the BA email address was changed, Avios transfers are paused for seven days.
Yes but then you have to fly PAL…
I’ve flown ANA and connected through HND to get from NYC to MNL; however, if PAL’s nonstop JFK-MNL is offered for just 120K Avios in J via QR’s Privilege Club, I may consider it, but it all depends on availability, which is hard to come by on this and any program these days. Sure, maybe you can find one available seat on a random Tuesday 120 days out, but that’s not the relatively ‘available’ that we used to see in this hobby. My point is that the times have changed, and it’s a lot easier said than done. Hope this works out for those that attempt it.
@Aaron – PAL is not too bad when considering the soft product, but still falls behind ANA, EVA, etc. overall in business class.
@1990 – good luck with that 120K from JFK. When I looked at this for a couple of random dates about 20 or so hours ago, they were clocking in at 154K, so that seems like the base. I just checked MNL-LAX/LAX-MNL, and it was all 110K across the board each way. Now, it’s pretty much 110K MNL-LAX, but only some LAX is now 110K/mostly 200K with most days toward the end of the schedule unavailable. I knew it was too good to last! (Thanks Gary, OMAAT, TPG, Seats.aero, et. all. – LOL!)
PAL has a monopoly on non-stop flights to Manila and they charge a premium for this.
The problem is they do not maintain their planes properly and haven’t for many years.
Too many things are worn out, broken, left unrepaired for months/years.
The online reviews are horrendous because of this.
My last 13+ hour fights between Los Angeles and Manila were uncomfortable.
It was like sitting on a hard park bench the entire time.
If you want to fly PAL, I recommend you bring your own seat cushion.
Your butt will thank you!
@OnePatriot77 — United’s SFO-MNL nonstop ain’t cheap, either. When searching for fares from NYC, often I see the EWR-SFO-MNL, but they’re always pitching tight connections, so no thanks.
I may be in the minority here, but I have actually been really impressed with PAL recently. Their domestic flights are often world class in quality if you are flying in business class. On two hour domestic flights they often offer lie-flat seats in widebody aircraft with a full, long-haul flight quality meal (with literal white-glove service) and champagne on top of included lounge access. The lie-flat seat even has a massage function. I have never experienced this level of hard product or service quality on a short-haul domestic route in the US. Ever. Good luck finding it in Europe (or even Japan for that matter). Routing to the Philippines from the US on points in business class at a decent rate has been very difficult the last couple of years (the only decent viable options to this point without PAL have been to route through Tokyo on very scarce JAL or ANA availability, to route through Doha on even rarer saver award Qsuites availability, or to route through Taipei or Singapore, usually on two different tickets). This Qatar partnership is great news!
$200 fees? C’mon Gary they’re almost exactly the same at Q-metal at around $300. And thats a lot. Intra-asia fees alone are more than the fare for a real air ticket Glad PAL is stepping in to the world of partners but the fees Qatar are adding make this mostly a bad deal.
“Philippine Airlines Awards Business Class Awards …”
@Steven — Sure, PAL does operate wide-body aircraft on short-haul domestic routes between major cities, like MNL-CEB, which is awesome to get lie-flat for those; otherwise, many of their flights are on a320, even for longer distances in E. Asia, and those are not as ‘fun,’ since no lie-flat, just recliners at-best, which is comparable to most US domestic routes, and better than the ‘sad’ should-not-even-be-called-business-class 3-3 blocked-middle like intra-Europe, but PAL also has some like that, so… ‘it depends.’