Book JetBlue (including Mint) award tickets with Qatar Avios

Update: When we posted this, I had completely missed the fact that you can book some of these routes online without the need to submit a booking request. The flights to Europe do not have surcharges online. I successfully booked a summer 2024 award for my family of four for 38,750 Avios + $10.10 per passenger in Mint class from Boston to Dublin.

Flights from New York or Boston to other European destinations (including Amsterdam, Paris, and Edinburgh) ring in at 62,000 Avios as expected.I have a few key tips here:

1. As noted above, you can book online and only pay $10.10 in taxes departing the US.
2. You can draw from your combined balance if you have your Qatar Airways and British Airways accounts linked. I first moved Iberia Avios to British Airways Avios per the instructions in this post. In the end, I had about 120K in British Airways Avios and 35K in Qatar Avios and I booked the award (155K total for four passengers one way) without moving the Avios from British Airways to Qatar (you do have to link the accounts).
3. I needed a few more points than I had, so I topped off by transferring Membership Rewards points to Qatar. That transfer was instant.
4. The confirmation number shown at ticketing is the Qatar Airways confirmation number. In the electronic receipt email you get via email immediately, in the top left corner there are two booking reference codes. The first is the Qatar one you got during checkout. The second says “B6”, which is the two-letter code for JetBlue. That’s the one you want to pop in at JetBlue.com or in the JetBlue app to select seats. I was able to select seats for my wife and I, but I got an error when trying to select seats for the kids. I’ll call tomorrow and see if we can get that done over the phone.
   

The original post follows.

You can now redeem Qatar Airways Avios for flights on JetBlue, including JetBlue Mint. You can’t easily search for availability online and you’ll need to have enough Avios in your account to pay for the ticket(s) in order to submit a booking request, but you can nonetheless score a very good deal on an award redemption. I suspect that the most exciting use will be for transcontinental JetBlue Mint, but this could also be useful for economy class redemptions on JetBlue.

The Deal

• You can now use Qatar Avios to book JetBlue flights, including both economy class and Mint class awards
• Direct link to log in to Qatar Privilege Club to submit a request (but read on for details about how this works)

How to book JetBlue flights with Qatar Avios

Qatar Airways Privilege Club uses the same Avios rewards currency as British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus (and in 2024, Finnair). You can move Avios directly between those programs, and this is a situation where you would need to do so since Qatar has a partnership with JetBlue, but the other airlines that use the Avios program do not.

Qatar Privilege Club has a decent distance-based award chart for partner redemptions:

This can potentially be useful for JetBlue domestic flights, though it’s better for Mint redemptions than for economy redemptions. That’s because a transcontinental Mint flight would ring in at 38,750 Qatar Avios one-way. Since JetBlue has no surcharges on domestic flights, you’d just be paying the taxes (presumably about $5.60 each way, though perhaps there are a couple more small taxes that they add). Economy redemptions start at 6,000 Avios one-way and the next band up from there isn’t bad if you can find availability (more on that to come).

The mechanics of booking an award aren’t very simple, and while it’s probably not impossible to figure out whether awards are available before you try to book, this isn’t as simple as logging on to Qatar’s site and searching.

In order to try to book, you have to follow these steps:

1. Log on to your Qatar Privilege Club account here to get to the search tool. Choose “Flights with other partners” and pick “Jet Blue” from the drop-down.
   
2. Enter your cities and dates. Note that you must have enough Avios in your account to book the award in order to submit a request.
3. Enter passenger details (including names, birthdays, passport numbers, etc)
4. Submit the request and wait to hear back via email (the form says to expect to hear back in 48 hours, One Mile at a Time reports having heard back within less than 24hrs on a recent request on another partner redemption). If there is availability, they will put the ticket(s) on hold and send you a link to pay the taxes online

Point #2 is a key. I just tested the process out myself and I only had 7,000 Avios in my Qatar account. The redemption I wanted would have cost 18,000 Avios, so I got an error telling me that I didn’t have enough Avios (and I therefore couldn’t see the form to fill it out and submit it).

I knew that I had enough Avios in my combined balance between Qatar and British Airways, but when I went to my Qatar Avios account dashboard, I saw that I needed to re-validate my British Airways account to connect the balances again. I did that and then had plenty of Avios for the redemption.

Unfortunately, I still got the same error about only having 7,000 Avios in my account even though my dashboard now showed my combined Avios balance. I therefore went to this page to move Avios from British Airways to Qatar. I moved over the additional 11,000 Avios I would need to ticket this award. Then, I went back to the search tool in Step #1 and I was able to submit the booking request. More of the story: you have to move enough Avios into your Qatar account to book in order to submit your request.

All that said, submitting a request doesn’t guarantee availability. OMAAT speculates that this will work the same as the partnership with Emirates used to in that you’ll need to find an “I” fare class available for a Mint redemption or a “P” fare class available for an economy class redemption.

How to find JetBlue flights that we think should be available as awards

The good news is that it is possible to find “I” (business) and “P” (economy) class availability online. The bad news is that it isn’t as simple as you’d like (and on some routes, I found no “P” class availability at all, so I’m not positive whether it even exists on all routes?). And I want to re-emphasize that it is only speculation at this point that I and P fares are what you need. We don’t know for sure that those fare classes will be available to Qatar or that all seats in those fare buckets will be available. Still, it seems like a reasonable educated guess.

If you have an ExpertFlyer account and you know how to use that tool, you will likely already know how to search by fare class and find flights with the right booking class available. For those of you who don’t have an ExpertFlyer account, ITA Matrix is probably going to be our best bet.

At ITA Matrix, you can enter your cities and then specify the carrier you want by typing the letter “C”, a colon, and the two-letter airline code. For JetBlue, you would type “C:B6” (without the quotation marks) for a non-stop JetBlue flight. To specify that you only want to search for the “P” fare class (the fare class that we assume needs to be available to book an award), you’ll type “F bc=P” into the extension box. See this example:

Change that “fare basis code” from “P” to “I” (in other words, “F bc=I”) to search for business class availability.

I ran a flexible date search for a one-way redemption from New York JFK to Orlando, FL and found good availability for P-class (economy) in January.

You can select a date and quickly confirm that there is indeed “P” class available on these flights while also confirming the distance.

At 944 miles in distance flown, Qatar would put this in their second distance band, so these flights would cost 9,000 Avios plus tax. That’s not a great deal compared to cash rates of $109 (though if you had caught a 30% transfer bonus to Avios, it might not be bad).

On some international routes, the redemption value for economy class awards can be a bit better. For instance, I looked up a flight from New York JFK to Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe that had seats in “P” class. That flight that cost $162 in “Blue” class (which is where I’d expect awards to book into) and I don’t think there are any carrier-imposed surcharges on that route. At a distance of over 1,800 miles flown, an economy class award would cost 11,000 Avios one-way. That’s actually more than the number of TrueBlue points on the same date I checked (JetBlue TrueBlue was charging 10,400 points), but once again if you had taken advantage of a transfer bonus, Qatar may be the better deal by a decent margin.

JetBlue has some Mint routes to the Caribbean, but I think that St. Thomas is the only Mint route that fits into a band other than the 38,750 point redemption band — and I couldn’t find a single day with a single seat in “I” class on that route.

Unfortunately, carrier-imposed surcharges on routes to/from Europe will likely make those redemptions almost entirely unattractive as Qatar does pass on surcharges. While JetBlue doesn’t have any surcharges on domestic flights, nor on some of the Caribbean international routes, but they have very high surcharges on European routes.

For instance, here is a flight from New York to Paris where JetBlue has “I” class available, which would indicate a Mint business class seat that we think could be available as an award through Qatar. Unfortunately, JetBlue has $950 in carrier-imposed surcharges on this flight, so I would unfortunately expect the flight to cost 62,000 Avios + taxes + $950. That’s not terribly attractive for an award to Europe.

The London route is lower on the way back from Europe at something over $500 in surcharges. Paris might be the best deal if you really want to redeem Avios for Mint class since carrier-imposed surcharges are only $212 from Paris to New York.

That said, keep in mind that you’ll still also be on the hook for mandatory taxes, which add up to $160.80 based on what ITA shows above. That means total taxes & fees on an award departing Paris will probably be $373.10. That’s not the most egregious set of surcharges, and it is far better than $950 + taxes, but it isn’t the cheapest way to get home from Europe in business class. On the other hand, availability of the “I” class fare looks pretty good…even for a family of four….even during the latter part of June and early part of July.

Things look a bit better yet from Amsterdam to New York JFK. Surcharges are a bit higher, but Dutch taxes are a bit lower, so by my calculations from ITA Matrix, I would guess that taxes & fees would come to $370.20 one-way. If “I” class is available for awards, it looks like there is availability for a family of four on 30 out of 31 days in August from Amsterdam to New York JFK.

However, you have to be aware that we don’t yet know that those seats will be available for award redemptions. This is a new booking option and we’ll need to collect more data points to be sure that those “I” class fares are indeed the ones you need to find for award availability.

I emphasize that in part because you need to have the Avios in your Qatar account to cover the award in order to email for availability (I’d hate to have someone transfer only to be in for a nasty surprise if Qatar doesn’t really have access to all “I” seats) and in part because I found no “P” class (economy) availability at all on a number of domestic US routes where I wouldn’t expect to run into a total roadblock. Perhaps JetBlue just has no seats available for economy class awards on any date on some routes (including some that aren’t very expensive) or perhaps award availability relies on some other fare class(es?).

I submitted a booking request on a date that doesn’t have “P” fare available according to ITA Matrix. Tickets definitely aren’t at their cheapest point on that route, so I my data point will only be valuable if it comes back as being bookable (I expect it won’t). I happened to have Avios already in my British Airways account and since those can be moved easily between the programs, there was no harm to me in moving them to Qatar to be able to fill out the form.

The other consideration here is that it would be far easier to do something like using Chase Ultimate Rewards points to book the same tickets. As you can see above, one-way business class fares on JetBlue from Amsterdam to New York start at $1433. That would be 95,534 Ultimate Rewards points. When you consider the fact that you would earn miles on that flight, that’s probably a better deal than 62,000 miles and $370 unless you got a solid transfer bonus.

Qatar Privilege Club Change / Cancellation Fees

Change and cancellation fees on awards booked via Qatar Avios are not free but are very reasonable at $25 for changes or cancellations more than 24 hours in advance. Between 3 and 24 hours in advance, you’ll pay $100. Awards can not be cancelled within 3 hours of departure.

Bottom line

Overall, the partnership here marks a rare chance to be able to use partner points to book JetBlue awards. That’s probably most exciting on transcontinental Mint routes given the fact that cash tickets can be quite expensive and awards are fairly reasonable at 38,750 points one-way (and a terrific deal if you got a 25 or 30 or 40% transfer bonus on the Avios). At the very least, it’s worth keeping this in your repertoire for a situation where it might come in handy…..though the waiting period of days to hear back on award availability is unideal.

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