Qatar Airways added a new restriction last week when it comes to redeeming your Avios to book award flights for other people. While its intention seems to be to restrict the ability for points/miles brokers to make award bookings, unfortunately the implementation of it is extremely stringent and could cause many problems for everyone else who wants to make legitimate award bookings for others.
The harsh ‘My List’ and ‘Family & Friends’ limitations
There are two different ways that you can redeem Avios from your Qatar Airways Privilege Club account to book flights for other people: ‘My List’ and ‘Family & Friends’.
‘My List’ is a feature that allows you to create a list of up to four other people who have an existing Privilege Club account. If you add them to your list—and they accept the invitation—you’ll be able to book award flights for them. ‘Family & Friends’ is somewhat similar, except that you can add up to six people but they can’t be existing Privilege Club members.
Things only start going downhill from there. For starters, anyone being added to a My List list has to have had a Privilege Club account open for at least 30 days. That’s not ideal, but some other airline loyalty programs have a somewhat similar policy. If you want to create a Family & Friends list, your Privilege Club account has to have been open for 30 days or more; there’s not that restriction for anyone you’d add to a Family & Friends list seeing as a key requirement of that feature is that they don’t have a Privilege Club account.
So far so good, but it’s the rest of the fine print that takes it from good to awful. For both features, the person creating the list has to have completed one of the following qualifying criteria:
- Flown a flight accrual with Qatar Airways or any partner airline, or
- Made at least one eligible cobranded credit card accrual transaction
That’ll make it impossible for many existing Privilege Club members to redeem Avios for other people. I imagine there are many people who’ve flown Qatar Airways on an award ticket, but not a revenue ticket; they would be ineligible. Likewise, anyone who’s flown Qatar Airways on a revenue ticket but credited the miles to a partner airline rather than to their Privilege Club account won’t be eligible either.
The alternative qualification criteria is scant consolation. The two US-based Qatar Airways credit cards issued by Cardless aren’t the most compelling of cards, so being forced to keep one of those open—and thus having to pay its annual fee year after year—in order to book award flights for your partner, children, and/or friends is ridiculous.
Most countries around the world don’t even have a Qatar Airways credit card that its residents can apply for in the first place, so for many people worldwide crediting a revenue ticket to Qatar Airways is their only option.
Other limitations
There are a few other key limitations and rules to be aware of. For ‘My List’, anyone you add has to be 18 years or older. Anyone added to a ‘My List’ can’t be added to any other list for as long as they’re on a list, and they have to remain on it for at least six months, although they can create their own ‘My List’.
With the ‘Family & Friends’ feature, children under the age of two aren’t eligible to be added; other than that, anyone from the age of two upwards can be added provided they don’t have a Privilege Club account.
With ‘Family & Friends’, seeing as a key restriction is that the people being added to the list don’t have a Privilege Club account, the main member who creates the list will earn Avios for all of them when booking a paid flight. The main member will only earn Qpoints towards elite status for their own flights though, not all the Qpoints from the accountless family and friends.
Final thoughts
This is an extremely disappointing development as Qatar Airways is ensuring that a large chunk—if not an outright majority—of its Privilege Club members won’t be able to redeem their Avios for award flights booked through them.
Thankfully there is a workaround. Avios programs allow you to freely move your points between each other. You can therefore, for example, move Avios that are in a Qatar Airways Privilege Club account to your British Airways Club account and redeem for other people that way.
There are a couple of potential downsides with this solution though. One is that some people have issues with connecting their various Avios accounts, thereby not allowing them to transfer from one to the other.
The other potential issue is that Qatar Airways sometimes has better award availability when booked directly with them than they offer to partners. It’s not going to be very helpful to transfer Avios from Qatar Airways to, say, British Airways in order to book an award flight for you and your partner, only to discover that you can’t do that anyway as Qatar isn’t making the flight available to its partners.
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I have an upcoming flight on AA and used my Aadvantage number to get my elite benefits, but I’d like to change that and credit it to Qatar. I remember going through various work arounds to do this years ago, but have no idea if it’s possible these days and, if so, how. Appreciate any directions. Thanks.
Contact them on chat to change the ff#
It’s even more restrictive than you guess from the initial “rules”.
To add your spouse, for example, one need to submit *Marriage Certificate* and *Copy of Passport*!!
That by it’s own violates Privacy Laws in USA/Europe and should be rebuked by proper authorities, but Qatar Airlines makes it very strict and demanding. And further makes it close to impossible for families to book award together (kids and spouses).
By their new “rules” if your spouse does have QR loyalty account/number and your children don’t – then they make it impossible to book award for family altogether.
Qatar needs to rethink and at minimum remove all ‘Family & Friends’ restrictions and Marriage Certificate requirements to keep people using their program. Otherwise they gonna loose whatever left after Iran’s conflict, and most of seats will fly empty for foreseeable future. That’s the reality! Hope they smart enough to recognize that.
Happy travels!!
Can still send the Avios to BA and to Finnair from there. 16.5k Avios for any domestic AA. Check availability on Alaska and call it in.
This is weird. I booked a couple of B6 Mint flights for my spouse and I through Qatar. Is Qatar now saying that my previous companion can’t travel with me (even though this customer would be visible to them as a companion I’ve traveled with)? Seems a bit draconian. It isn’t that hard to credit an AA flight to Qatar at some point, but still a hassle.
That being said, if this lessens demand for QR flights, that’s a win I suppose. There’s been so little inventory, but I imagine QR is anticipating that fewer people will be flying the ME3 in the near future and they don’t want increased points inventory abused.
Frankly there’s simply too much demand for the volume of seats available, particularly in premium cabins. And mileage brokers only compound that problem. QR will likely still sell every J seat they make available on points, but this way, they now know those seats will be going to ostensibly more profitable or more engaged members of their loyalty program. And for those of us who can be creative, complexity results in better opportunities.
I’d rather QR do something like this than what we have recently seen from JL which is just that they’ve more or less stopped releasing more than 2 J seats.
This isn’t the best of times for ME3, so I’m not surprised that they’re all making negative changes to their programs. There’re only a few redemptions via QR that are worthwhile, but I don’t expect them to last long…
Anything that works against mileage brokers, I am in favor of. Inconvenient yes, help keep value in points and miles also yes. At least it’s not like Eva air
For me this is worse. I have never flown on Qatar. My husband has never flown on Qatar. Neither of us has ever credited a flight to Qatar. We don’t typically fly on paid flights on AA so there’s no way for us to accrue any credits to Qatar. So now, I cannot book my husband an award seat using Qatar Avios unless I decide to credit our upcoming Alaska Air flights to Qatar instead of Alaska. This makes Qatar useless to anyone with a two person or more household.
Have you tried getting qatar biz class saver award flights? The mileage brokers run software that grabs them within seconds. Crediting a oneworld flight to Qatar is not difficult.
Okay. Its equally bad to EVA cause with EVA I wouldn’t be able to book for him either.
Totally agree. The mileage brokers have been painful. Have lost multiple J class award bookings when they grab Saver flights within seconds (using software) on release.
The selfish part of me wants to just let everyone abandon QR redemptions, but I’ll just say that, for Americans, 1 cheap AA/AS flight isn’t hard to come by, and moving Avios to P2’s account and then booking an award through their login is trivial. Good luck, but maybe don’t tell people how easy it is, since all the panic means me flights for you.
I guess they don’t want to sell their points to US transferrable points programs? This is even more bone-headed than the Etihad cancellation policies. Cooler heads will prevail when they see a massive drop-off in points transferred to the program. This won’t last as they’ve designed it.
To add insult to injury, doing a cheap Basic Economy cash rate run won’t help because it doesn’t earn miles or Avios. Using the revenue flight method of qualifying must result in Avios being awarded to your Qatar account.
Thank you for this- I was literally researching this last night. Great timing!
Did the new policies already go into effect?
Yup
So what is the difference between the “Friends & Family” list, and the “My List” list – other than one is for people with existing Qatar accounts, and one is for those without an existing Qatar account? Other than that, are they functionally equivalent? (What is the big deal about having/not having an account that they went so far around the bend to come up with this scheme to require everyone to set up and manage multiple lists?)
What happens if, for example, you add your spouse (who has no Qatar account) to your “Friends & Family” list, and then they later sign up for a Qatar account? Are they disqualified from having a Qatar account? Or do they get automatically booted out of your “Friends & Family” list?
What happens if, for example, you add your spouse (who DOES have a Qatar account) to your “My List” list, and then later she closes her Qatar account? Are they disqualified from closing their Qatar account? Or do they get automatically booted out of your “My List” list?
Let’s say you and your spouse both want to be able to book flights for the two of you together? How does that work? Is that even possible, or do the requirements for the lists now prohibit that (if I’m reading this correctly, it appears this is now impossible, no)?
This is not a farfetched, edge case – if you and your spouse both fly paid flights on Qatar and its partners (or if you both have a mountain of Amex points), it would seem there’s no way that either of you can book travel for both of you together – no? So now one (or both) of you are punished for having a Qatar loyalty account. If you’ve got a P2 who wants to be an active participant in booking your flights, is there no way to ever set up your accounts so you can do that?
My head hurts now.
It takes a special kind of stupid and some pretty hard work to come up with a convoluted mess like this. Someone deserves to be fired.
That’s a good point, I feel like it would’ve been a reasonable workaround to add a third category which is to allow people to book tickets on the same PNR even for other people. After all, points brokers don’t typically fly on the flights WITH their customers. Delta used to use this strategy with RUCs/GUCs – so that you couldn’t sell them or give them away, but you could use them with someone else who is on the same flight.
I had previously linked my Qatar and BA accounts, but was a bit surprised how easy it was to move all but 250 of my Avios from Qatar to BA through avios.com. Really fast and painless. My nine flights with my wife on Qatar were great (including flights booked through Privilege Club), but unless this is changed, I’m done. Not going to give up my Platinum/Sapphire privileges by crediting AA or BA flights to Qatar.
This is either going to 1) complicate my hobby by booking paid fares on AA and credit to QR or 2) simplify my hobby by having one less program to worry about. I’m leaning towards #2.