What I learned from watching Greg find Qatar QSuite award flights [Video]

While I definitely am no closer to learning how to properly pronounce “Qatar”, I am learning lots of other nerdy things by watching Greg’s how-to videos. This time, he walks through how to find Qatar QSuite award flights. (For all of you newbies like me, getting to fly QSuites is like the travel equivalent of scoring a ticket to the Taylor Swift Eras tour. Am I wrong?)

Here are some of the things I learned from Greg’s most recent How-To video. (I’ll include the timestamps so you can navigate directly to each part in YouTube if you prefer, though it’s a pretty short video if you want to watch it all the way through above instead.)

What I learned from watching Greg find Qatar QSuite award flights:

1. 00:00 – American Airlines’ website is the easiest place to search for Qatar Airways awards, even if you’re not going to be using American Airline Miles. This is mostly thanks to a handy calendar view available on their website.
2. 00:28 – Searching in one-ways makes it much easier to find award availability. (To take it a step further, Greg starts by just searching flights to Doha, Qatar Airways’ hub.)
3. 01:35 – By searching for a flight to Doha, then filtering the calendar view by “Nonstop only”, you’re mostly limiting all the flight results to just Qatar Airways.
4. 02:18 – Pay attention to the taxes and fees of the flight you select on the American Airlines calendar though. Very high fees may indicate a British Airways flight instead.
5. 04:19 – Once you find an acceptable flight, you can use Google Flights to see whether or not that flight will have an “individual suite”. This will likely mean it’s in QSuites, though this is not guaranteed. In part because Qatar has other individual-suite products, and in part because the aircraft can always be changed last minute.
6. 06:35 – If you want to search for flights beyond Doha, you can enter the destination you have in mind, then filter the American Airlines’ calendar by “1 stop or fewer” instead. The assumption here is that Doha is the first stop, and your destination is the second.
7. 07:26 – Even though American Airlines’ site is the easiest to start with for finding general availability, if you can’t find anything for destinations beyond that, it may be worth searching on Qatar Airways’ own site, (or a different partner’s site), since American Airlines may not have access to all the flights you’d find elsewhere. As an example, Greg first found availability from Chicago to Doha on American Airlines’ site for a specific date in June, but when he tried to find options for Chicago to Maldives instead, the June options disappeared. That’s when he recommended going to QatarAirways.com and BritishAirways.com to see if those June dates show up again for the Maldives destination on QatarAirways.com or AA.com.

Bonus tips from Greg, not included in the video:

• While American Airlines’ website may be the easiest to search, keep in mind that it can only see award space 11 months out while British Airways and Qatar can see (and book) award space further out.
• A super easy way to find which routes Qatar serves is to use flightconnections.com and filter to airline Qatar.  (In the video Greg searched Chicago to Doha: a tool like flight connections could help him decide which route to search.)

Comment below to let us know if you learned something new by watching this how-to video! (And if there are other how-to’s you’d like to see.)

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