Qatar Airways Now Has a Reward Seat Calendar (With a Glitch)

Qatar Airways has introduced a useful feature allowing its loyalty program members to search for available awards for 1 month at a time.

Called “My Reward Seat Finder,” it’s available on the Qatar Airways site but appears to have some glitches that limit its potential usefulness.

Let’s look at how this works.

The Qatar Airways Reward Seat Finder in Action

The Reward Seat Finder lets you search for award seats on Qatar Airways for the next 12 months. It does not show availability on partner airlines, including those in the Oneworld alliance like American Airlines or Alaska Airlines.

If you have an account with the Qatar Airways Privilege Club loyalty program, you can “simply search for flights and check availability up to 1 year in advance, and then you can book directly from the website. No matter which dates you select, you can view all options for an entire calendar month at one glance,” the airline promises.

This is a nifty tool, in principle, but it has a problem. When we searched for award seats with it, it showed only economy class, even when searching specifically for business or first only.

As an example, we searched for award seats in premium cabins from New York (JFK) to Male, Maldives (MLE) in January. The Maldives are an especially coveted destination in winter from the Northern Hemisphere.

In this case, premium cabins would mean business class since Qatar Airways only offers first class on the Airbus A380, which does not fly to New York or Male.

The calendar that appeared looked very attractive. In fact, it would have been a screaming bargain with points — 42,500 Qatar Airways Avios for a flight to the Maldives in Qsuites business class is nothing short of exceptional.

But there was a problem: the points fares shown were all in economy class, even when specifying premium class only.

Opening the individual dates showed clearly that those points numbers referred to coach class.

Note that you cannot proceed with an award booking unless you have at least 50% of the Avios required in your account. Also, note that the results of the award search do not show the taxes, fees, and fuel surcharges, which can be hefty on Qatar Airways.

Final Thoughts

The Qatar Airways My Reward Seat Finder is a handy tool for finding seats bookable with Qatar Airways points. In its current iteration, however, its usefulness is limited to searching for seats in economy class. If you are looking for award seats in Qatar’s excellent QSuites business class, for now at least, you’ll have to continue searching day-by-day.