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 reportedly first class quality. I haven’t personally had a chance to fly QSuites yet, but it’s high on my list! In fact, I recently booked QSuites to the Maldives for early next year using the techniques that you’ll find below.
QSuite awards can be booked with points from AA, Alaska, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, 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 (please let me know if I missed any): 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:
Finding QSuites award space step by step
In this guide, I’ll show how to find Qatar award space using a combination of Seats.aero and American Airlines’ website. If you don’t have AA miles, that’s fine. You can use this technique to find award space and then separately book the award with non-AA miles.
1. Find nonstop QSuites awards first using Seats.aero
The trick is to first find QSuites award availability on the long-distance overseas flight and then expand out to find award space on 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.
The Seats.Aero website includes a “Qatar Qsuites Finder” tool. This makes it incredibly easy to find nonstop Qatar business class award space on the routes that this tool includes. The free version of the tool shows availability for the next two months, whereas the pro version (which costs $7.99 per month) shows about 11 months of availability.
To find QSuites flights from North America to Doha, do the following:
- Browse to seats.aero
- Select the Qatar Qsuites Finder tool: Click the Tools menu and then pick “Qatar Qsuites Finder”. Alternatively you can browse directly to: seats.aero/qsuites.
- Select show flights from “North America” to “Anywhere”
(if you’re trying to find a return flight to North America, change it to be from “Anywhere” to “North America”)
- If you have the pro version, make sure to check the box to show extended availability.
All of the results now show Qatar flights that have business class award availability. If you want to find flights from a particular airport that is served by Qatar Airways, you can put the airport’s three letter code into the Search box on the right. For example, type in PHL to find flights departing from Philadelphia.
The Qatar Qsuites Finder tool doesn’t show how many seats are available on each flight. Instead, it quickly gives you a great place to start.
Additionally, the tool doesn’t show with certainty which of the flights offer Qsuites. But it does have icons that can help:
Next to each flight, seats.aero shows an icon to represent the type of seating you’ll find on the flight. The green bed icon means that the flight definitely features QSuites because it is operated by a Qatar Airways A350-1000 (all of which feature QSuites). The black bed icon means that it is definitely a flat bed seat, but may or may not be QSuites.
If you see the flat icon,bed you can determine if the route is scheduled to fly QSuites by searching for the same business class flight on qatarairways.com and looking for the “Qsuite” indicator in the results. Full details about this are later in this post.
2. Search AA.com
Now that you’ve used Seats.aero to find some nonstop routes that may work for you, the rest of the work can happen on AA’s website…
Go to the AA.com home page. You do not need to log in first. Make sure to select the following in the home page dialog:
- One way: Select this instead of Round trip
- Redeem miles: Check the box!
- From: ORD (or, whichever Qatar-served airport identified in step 1)
- To: DOH
- Number of passengers: How many people will be traveling together?
- Depart: Put the date of departure that you found in step 1. If you found a number of dates that would work for you, put in the earliest one. You will not be limited to finding awards on that date.
- Press Search
3. Use AA’s Calendar
After pressing Search, above, you’ll get to a results screen. Ignore it and click directly to AA’s award calendar. Click the word “CALENDAR” on the right:
Once the calendar pops up, change the two drop-down boxes to: “Nonstop only” and “Business / First“. Now you’ll see dates where non-stop award flights are available on your non-stop route for 2 adults (or however many you put into the initial search screen). Since Qatar is the only airline that flies non-stop on this route, the display below means that Qatar business class is available for 2 adults from Chicago to Doha on Jan 4, 6, and 10. We don’t know for sure from this that the available flights offer QSuites, but it’s likely.
4. Navigate within the Calendar
If you have a lot of flexibility with dates then press the arrow on either side of the calendar to advance (or go back) a month. For example, here are the results I found for April and October 2022 when I first authored this post:
5. Expand search to final destination
As mentioned before, the scenario explored here is the goal of booking an award from Denver to the Maldives and to fly QSuites most of the way. Let’s say that April is a good time to go. In that case, note the available nonstop dates and then return to AA’s home page to start a new search:
- One way
- Redeem miles
- From: ORD (or, whichever Qatar-served airport you want to start with)
- To: MLE (Velana International Airport in Malé, Maldives)
- Number of passengers: How many people will be traveling together?
- Depart: Put the earliest date that you’d be willing to depart based on available dates found earlier.
- Press Search
6. Use AA’s Calendar Again
Click to view the calendar and then change the drop-down menus to “1 stop or fewer” and “Business / First“:
Only one one-stop flight shows up, but unfortunately even that one is not on Qatar. I can tell at a glance because 115K is too much (AA charges 70K for Qatar business class to the Maldives) and because when I select the available date, AA shows $373.40 in taxes/fees (not shown in screen capture above) and that’s too much for a Qatar flight (expect to pay less than $100 in fees).
If your dates are very flexible, you can now use the arrows to advance month by month to search for award space. In this Chicago to the Maldives example, October looked much better:
7. Identify the best candidate dates/times
If you couldn’t find good dates with your original origin city (Chicago, in my example), then repeat the above steps with different starting cities until you find dates that work for you. Click through each available date to confirm that the flight details really match what you want. In some cases you may find really bad connection times and/or mixed cabin awards (e.g. maybe the flight onward from Doha is in economy instead of business class). Write down the details about each of the good departure dates, including the time of departure from the U.S. (this is very important because if the flight leaves very early in the morning, you’ll want to look for a connecting flight from your home airport that leaves the day before). For example, some flights from Chicago depart at 1:25am and so you would want to fly to Chicago on the day before.
For the example at hand, lets assume that the following dates worked best from Chicago:
- Oct 12: Depart 1:25am, Arrive MLE Oct 13 at 3:20pm
- Oct 17: Depart 1:25am, Arrive MLE Oct 18 at 3:20pm
- Oct 17: Depart 7:50pm, Arrive MLE Oct 19 at 8:35am
8. Expand search to include home airport
While you could book the award found above and separately book a flight to get to the starting airport on time, that’s not ideal. By booking the entire one-way journey on a single itinerary, you get the following benefits:
- Save miles/points: Depending on what miles/points you use to book the trip, you may not have to pay extra miles or points to depart from Denver rather than Chicago (in the example given above). AA, for example, won’t charge more, but British Airways and Qatar Airways will.
- Protection when things go wrong: If you book separately and you can’t get to the first QSuites flight on time, you may be out of luck. When you book everything together and things go wrong, the airline will do what they can to get you all the way to your destination.
- Check bags through: If you’re planning to check bags, you might as well do so from your home airport if possible.
In the example, above, I want to originate in Denver and I know that I’d have to leave Denver on October 11th, 16th, or 17th to catch one of the flights I found. So, I return to the AA home page to search Denver to the Maldives, starting on October 11th:
- One way
- Redeem miles
- From: DEN (enter your home airport)
- To: MLE (Velana International Airport in Malé, Maldives)
- Number of passengers: How many people will be traveling together?
- Depart: Put the earliest date that you’d be willing to depart based on available dates found earlier.
- Press Search
9. Return to AA’s Calendar
Go to the Calendar screen again and select “2 stops or fewer” and “Business / First“.
As you can see, there appear to be many dates that would work, but the results are deceiving. Often you’ll see many dates that look good but only because AA found British Airways flights instead of Qatar flights. In those cases, if you click on the date, you’ll notice that the taxes are way too high. That’s not the case here, though…
My first thought was that the calendar showed many good dates because AA found other good connecting cities besides Chicago. And that is part of the explanation, but not the main thing. In reality, many of the dates shown on the calendar seem to be phantom results. That is, they show up on the calendar screen, but not on the full results screen when I click through. By clicking on each of the October dates that showed availability in the calendar, I found the following bookable business class awards:
- Oct 11 (Seattle): Alaska Airlines economy DEN-SEA; Qatar Business Class SEA-DOH-MLE
- Oct 12 (Seattle): Alaska Airlines economy DEN-SEA; Qatar Business Class SEA-DOH-MLE
- Oct 18 (Los Angeles): AA First Class DEN-LAX; Qatar Business Class LAX-DOH-MLE
- Oct 25 (Seattle): Alaska economy DEN-SEA; Qatar Business Class SEA-DOH-MLE
- Oct 25 (Dallas): AA First Class DEN-DFW; Qatar Business Class DFW-DOH-MLE
- Oct 26 (Seattle): Alaska Airlines economy DEN-SEA; Qatar Business Class SEA-DOH-MLE
- Oct 28 (Seattle): Alaska Airlines economy DEN-SEA; Qatar Business Class SEA-DOH-MLE
- Oct 28 (Chicago): AA First Class DEN-ORD; Qatar Business Class ORD-DOH-MLE
- Oct 30 (Dallas): AA First Class DEN-DFW; Qatar Business Class DFW-DOH-MLE
We now have a list of bookable Qatar business class award flights from Denver or Chicago. If you are using miles that allow free or cheap changes (AA allows free changes, for example), then book whatever is closest to what you actually want and check back frequently to see if something better opens up. For example, you could book a flight from Chicago and keep checking over time to see if AA award flights open up between Denver and Chicago.
10. Check if Qatar is really flying QSuites on the route you found
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:
Booking QSuites awards
Qatar is a OneWorld airline and so you should be able to use any OneWorld airline’s miles to book these flights. If you have AA miles, though, I recommend starting there. AA offers the following advantages:
- No change or cancellation fees
- Ability to mix and match partners (e.g. fly Alaska Airlines or JetBlue and then Qatar on the same award)
- Very good award prices (70K to the Middle East or Indian Subcontinent, 75K to Africa)
- No fuel surcharges when booking Qatar flights
There are some downsides to booking with AA, though:
- Routing rules: AA will let you book a single award flight on Qatar from the U.S. to the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, or to Africa. But if you want to end up in Europe, Asia, or the South Pacific you would have to book two separate awards. Some other mileage programs will allow a wider range of destinations on a single award.
- Booking far in advance: AA will allow you to book 330 days in advance while some other programs allow booking further out. For example, I believe that Qatar and Cathay Pacific allow booking ~360 days in advance.
Note that Alaska Mileage Plan has similar advantages and disadvantages as booking with AA except that Alaska charges more and does not allow mixing partners on the same itinerary (e.g. you can book an Alaska Airlines flight plus Qatar, but not AA plus Qatar).
Award prices by program
Using the example of Chicago to the Maldives via Doha in business class one-way, here are the prices I found:
- AA: 70,000 miles + ~$45
- Alaska Airlines: 85,000 miles + $55
- Qatar: 85,000 Avios + ~$200
[Note: Qatar opens far more award space to their own members at double the price so you’ll find that you can book this route for 170,000 miles almost any day you want] - British Airways Avios: 85,000 Avios + ~$207
- Cathay Pacific Asia Miles: 90,000 miles + ? (I couldn’t get Cathay’s website to show results)
- Qantas: 139,200 + ? (Qantas’ website doesn’t seem to be currently able to find Qatar business class award space)
Here’s how you can get any of the above listed points by transferring from various programs:
| Rewards Program | Amex Transfer Ratio (and transfer time) | Chase Transfer Ratio (and transfer time) | Citi Transfer Ratio (and transfer time) | Marriott Transfer Ratio (and transfer time) | Capital One Transfer Ratio (and transfer time) | Brex Transfer Ratio (and transfer time) | Bilt Transfer Ratio (and transfer time) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alaska MileagePlan | 60K to 25K (~2 days) | ||||||
| American AAdvantage | 3K to 1K (~2 days) | 1 to 1 (1 Day) | |||||
| British Airways Avios | 1 to 1 (Instant) | 1 to 1 (Instant) | 1 to 1 via Qatar (1 to 2 days) | 60K to 25K (~10 hours) | 1 to 1 (Unknown) | 1 to 1 (~1 Minute) | |
| Cathay Pacific Asia Miles | 1 to 1 (Instant) | 1 to 1 (Instant) | 60K to 25K (~1 day) | 1 to 1 (Instant) | 1,670 to 1K (Unknown) | 1 to 1 (~1 Minute) | |
| Qantas Frequent Flyer | 1 to 1 (Instant) | 1 to 1 (~1 day) | 60K to 25K (~2 days) | 1 to 1 (~1 day) | 1,670 to 1K (Unknown) |
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 if your dates are flexible. And American Airlines helps in a couple of ways: 1) AA provides an easy way to find QSuite award availability via their award calendar; and 2) In most cases, AA miles are the best currency to use to book these awards.
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