Qatar Airways massively increased the cost of its awards in 2018, and then in 2020 they quietly backtracked. Since then they’ve been on a roll to really add value to their frequent flyer program and make it competitive.

They’ve even made Avios their loyalty currency, with full one-to-one transfers (for instance) to British Airways meaning that the worst you’ll do with Qatar’s program is get the same value as BA’s program.

• Qatar Airways is a Citibank transfer partner
  
• You can transfer your BA and Iberia miles to Qatar and almost every bank currency transfers to BA

Qatar Airways miles are great for booking Qatar Airways QSuites business class at reasonable redemption pricing. But they’ve been a terrible way to book award travel on any of their partners, so much so that I never talk about the program’s value in terms of its partners at all. For any purpose other than redeeming on Qatar the advice has been to transfer Qatar’s points into your British Airways account (and except for the shortest distance awards, BA isn’t cheap for partners!).

However, via Mainly Miles, Qatar Airways has updated its partner award chart to match BA’s which means cutting redemption prices as much as 60%.

This should be better than booking through British Airways for redemptions on American Airlines, which are now available on the Qatar Privilege Club website (also better for Alaska redemptions).

And it isn’t just ‘matching British Airways’ because Qatar has partners that you can’t book through BA, but where you can use this award chart. Their non-oneworld partners include:

• Virgin Australia (where pricing will often be better than through Air Canada or United)
  
• LATAM (while LATAM left oneworld, Qatar Airways still owns a stake in the carrier)
  
• Middle East Airlines
  
• Oman Air (Doha – Muscat only)
  
• RwandAir
  
• Bangkok Airways

These may be relatively niche for some readers but really valuable for booking around Thailand, South America, the Mideast, Australia and Africa.

Note that for most partners, the online booking process is.. antiquated at best. Since most partners aren’t online for booking, you fill out a request form, they deduct the points, and then ticket if the space is available (otherwise refunding your points). Otherwise you have to call.

Qatar has prioritized their loyalty program over the past three years, making improvements like awarding miles even before you fly, at a time when Emirates has largely been lighting its program on fire and Etihad has undergone a series of more modest devaluations. This change makes Privilege Club more than just a program for redeeming QSuites.