How to find Qatar QSuites award space

Qatar Airways’ QSuites business class is widely considered to be one of the best business class products available worldwide. Seats can be configured to be either very private or with shared space as shown below. And service and food is near-first class quality. My wife and I flew QSuites in 2023 and loved it (see my review here). The good news is that award prices for flying QSuites are often very good. The bad news is that award seats can be very hard to find. That’s where this guide comes in…

Overview

QSuite awards can be booked with points from AA, Alaska, British Airways, JetBlue, Iberia, Qatar, and more. If you don’t have any of those miles, you’re still in luck if you have transferable points since most currencies offer transfers to one or more of these programs.

Qatar offers QSuites on some flights to Doha from each of these North American airports: Atlanta (ATL), Boston (BOS), Chicago (ORD), Dallas (DFW), Houston (IAH), Los Angeles (LAX), Miami (MIA), Montreal (YUL), New York (JFK), Philadelphia (PHL), San Francisco (SFO), Seattle (SEA), Washington DC (IAD). From Doha, you could continue on to nearly anywhere in the world:

The trick to finding QSuites awards is to 1) find nonstop flights to or from Qatar’s hub in Doha; 2) make sure the route really offers QSuites; and 3) look for connecting flights. For example, suppose you want to fly from Denver to the Maldives. In that case, you’ll want to first find award space from Qatar served airports in North America to Doha (Qatar’s hub). Once you’ve found transatlantic award space, you can then expand your search to try to build a single award that gets you all the way from your origin to your destination. Worst case, you may have to book separate positioning flights from Denver to the departing airport and/or from Doha to the Maldives. Once you’re all done with that, you’ll want to repeat the whole process in reverse to get home (assuming you want to fly QSuites in both directions).

This process isn’t perfect. Sometimes Qatar releases award space only for connecting itineraries and not for non-stop flights (this is referred to as married segment logic). For example, even if an award flight from Chicago to Cape Town via Doha is available, the individual segments (Chicago to Doha and Doha to Cape Town) might not be available. Still, the process described here is useful for finding many great awards.

1) Find Nonstop Award Space

The best way to find nonstop Qatar business class awards is with a tool called Seats.Aero. The free version of the tool shows availability for the next two months, whereas the pro version (which costs $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year) shows 12 months of availability.

Seats.Aero has a built-in “Qatar Qsuites Finder” tool, but I think that an even better option is the tool’s Explore feature. Specifically, I recommend setting the Explore function to “Virgin Australia Velocity.” Even if you don’t have any way to get Virgin Australia points, their program is arguably the best for finding available awards. Once you’ve found awards, they can be booked from different points programs (more about that later in this post).

To find QSuites flights from North America to Doha, do the following:

1. Browse to seats.aero
2. Select Explore… Virgin Australia Velocity
3. Select show flights from “North America” to “Anywhere”
4. Click the “Arrives” drop-down and select “DOH”. This is a paid, “Pro” feature. If you don’t have Pro, use these links instead:
   • To filter to flights arriving in Doha, click here: seats.aero/velocity/arriving/DOH?originRegion=North%20America&destinationRegion=Anywhere
   • To filter to flights departing from Doha, click here: seats.aero/velocity/departing/DOH?originRegion=Anywhere&destinationRegion=North%20America.
5. If you have the pro version, make sure to click the box that says “60 days” and change it to “Full year”.
6. Click the Business column to sort ascending by required number of points

All of the results in green will now show Qatar flights that have business class award availability. The “Last Seen” column indicates when the tool last saw that award space. That’s important because some of the award space you find may no longer be available.

Here are some tips for narrowing results:

• Multiple passengers: If you are looking for more than 1 passenger, click the “Seats” drop-down and increase the number of seats. (Pro version only)
• Fewer airports: To limit the North American airports you’re interested in, click the “Departs” drop-down and select the airports you want. (Pro version only)
• Date filters: To filter to a specific month, enter the month in the search box (either the search box at the middle, right or the one at the bottom under the date column) in year-month format. For example, to filter to January 2025, you would put: 2025-01. Or you can limit to a specific day by adding the day of the month as well: 2025-01-16

When you find available dates that look promising, click the little info box icon (an “i” inside a circle) to the right of the flight info. That will bring up more information and will automatically refresh the data to make sure it’s not out of date.

2) Check if the route you found features QSuites

Not all Qatar business class flights feature QSuites. A quick way to find if a route is flying QSuites is to use Google Flights to find the nonstop long-haul portion of your itinerary, select business class, and then expand details by clicking the down arrow. Look for the words “Individual suite” to indicate that Qatar is flying QSuites (or their Boeing 787-9 Business Class Suite, which is considered excellent too).

A more certain way to determine if the route is scheduled to fly QSuites is to search for the same business class flight on qatarairways.com and look for the “Qsuite” indicator as shown here:

3) Find connecting flights

Once you’ve found the nonstop flight you want, you’ll need to also find a flight to the departing airport and from Doha to your final destination. For example, if you live in Denver, and found a flight from Chicago to Doha, and finally want to end up in the Maldives then you’ll need to find a flight from Denver to Chicago and from Doha to the Maldives.

To find these connecting flights, I recommend using a tool like PointsYeah or AwardTool. You can find more information about these and other tools here: Which award search tool is best?

Before actually booking any connecting flights, though, you’ll want to first figure out how you’re going to book the Qatar flight. In some cases you can save points and potential headaches by booking all of the flights through a single mileage program. If you have to book the positioning flights separately, you probably won’t be protected if one of the earlier flights is canceled or delayed.

Booking QSuites awards

Not surprisingly, Qatar itself has the best access to Qatar awards. And, fortunately, Qatar business class flights between North America and Doha are reasonably priced in three one-way bands: 70K saver awards; 94.5K expanded availability awards; and 140K Flexi awards. The process shown earlier in this post for finding awards will find only the first two types of awards (70K and 94.5K). Taxes and fees run about $100 per passenger when flying from North America to Doha, and about $155 per person in the other direction. If you cancel or change more than 24 hours before your flight, Qatar charges only $25 per passenger.

Additionally, Qatar Avios are really easy to get. Every major transferable points program offers 1 to 1 transfers to Qatar Avios either directly or indirectly (transfer first to another Avios program and then to Qatar). If you have Avios in other programs, you can move those Avios from one program to another. See: How to transfer Avios between British Airways, Qatar, Iberia, and Aer Lingus.

Here are the major points programs that offer 1 to 1 transfers to Qatar Avios either directly or indirectly:

1. British Airways: British Airways has access to the same 70K saver space available to Qatar, including some but not all 94.5K flights which are available to Qatar show up on BA.com. If you have trouble booking connecting itineraries through Qatar’s website, it might be worth trying to accomplish the same through BA.com instead. BA charges $55 per passenger for changes and cancelations (which must be done at least 24 hours before departure).
2. JetBlue: JetBlue has access to the same 70K saver space available to Qatar, but the award price may be more than 70K depending upon where in North America you’re flying from or to (they charge 80K from many airports to Doha). Unfortunately, JetBlue doesn’t have access to 94.5K expanded availability awards or 140K Flexi awards. On the other hand, JetBlue award cancelations are free, so that’s a nice advantage to using JetBlue rather than Qatar or BA. Additionally, the taxes and fees are much lower when booking through JetBlue vs. Qatar or BA.
3. Alaska: Alaska has two tiers of Qatar awards with very, very little availability at the saver level (i.e. good luck finding business class Qatar flights costing 85K or less one-way). They do offer very good availability at the higher tier but those prices start at around 150,000 miles one-way. That’s not a great deal. If you have Alaska miles and you can find saver awards, though, Alaska might be worth considering for it’s free stopovers on one-way awards.
4. American Airlines: AA has very, very little access to Qatar business class awards. The process shown earlier in this post for finding Qatar awards will not identify awards bookable with American Airlines (but you can use Seats.Aero’s QSuites Finder Tool to find AA bookable flights). That’s sad because AA is the best program to book with if you can find availability. AA offers the best pricing for longer itineraries (for example, North America to Doha to South Africa costs only 75K miles), free changes and cancelations, and the ability to mix partners within a single award.

Here’s how you can get any of the above listed points by transferring from various programs:

Wrap up

Despite the fact that Qatar’s QSuite awards are among the most coveted flights around, it’s not too hard to find award availability with the techniques presented above as long as your dates are flexible and you’re willing to book connecting flights as needed.

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