Several months after officially joining oneWorld Alaska Mileage Plan has finally managed to add fellow member Qatar Airways as redemption eligible partner carrier and awards can now be booked – with restrictions!
Mileage Plan members that are seeking to book these flights can do so online or through Alaska Airlines reservations center by calling in.
Overall the rates for Qatar Airways flights booked with Alaska Miles seem rather high unlike certain other carriers such as Japan Airlines and Cathay Pacific.
You can access the Qatar Airways section on Alaska’s website here.
I thought that with Alaska Airlines becoming a oneWorld member these strange discrepancies of mileage rates and zoning between different carriers would finally come to an end but this still doesn’t seem to be the case.
For example you can’t even use Qatar Airways to book flights from Europe to Asia which is a bunch of nonsense. What’s the point of Alaska joining oneWorld if you can’t even use your miles on all worldwide routes of other oneWorld members? That this is even being tolerated doesn’t make any sense.
And while we’re at it, you can’t book Qatar Airways from North America to Asia either. Only the “Indian Subcontinent” is available from the U.S. / Canada.
Here is an example of pricing options and available routes/regions:
- Continental U.S./Alaska/Canada to Indian Subcontinent (vv) Y 42,500 miles / C 85,000 miles
- Continental U.S./Alaska/Canada to Middle East (vv) Y 42,500 miles / C 85,000 miles
- Continental U.S./Alaska/Canada to Africa (vv) Y 50,000 miles / C 120,000 miles
- Middle East to South Pacific (vv) Y 50,000 miles / C 100,000 miles
- Middle East to Europe (vv) Y 25,000 miles / C 65,000 miles
- Middle East to Indian Subcontinent (vv) Y 17,500 miles / C 40,000 miles
When you price it it looks like this:
This isn’t cheap to begin with but it actually gets worse, sometimes the prices displayed are totally out of whack as they are based on award booking classes (Saver Fares).
Here is such a case:
140,000 miles for a one way from New York to Mumbai in Economy Class. I wonder what this will be booked in as Alaska can’t access any special booking classes on partners. Are they just charging a fortune in miles and book a ticket at market price?
Conclusion
Finally Alaska Mileage Plan has added Qatar Airways as a partner for redeeming miles but the routes offers are lackluster and expensive.
Hopefully Mileage Plan gets their stuff together very soon and finally rolls out proper oneWorld awards that allows redemptions on all routes with all partners – worldwide.
Unless it’s something “still in the process” it’s total nonsense. I didn’t expect that from Alaska to begin with. Even stranger it’s when AS joined OneWorld, can’t agree with you more.
My observations:
EUR-DOH 65K biz OW
EUR-DOH-DXB 90K biz OW – unless it’s a mistake just crazy
EUR-DOH-CMB/MLE/SZE – can’t price it even if it’s available by segments
shameful
wow just wow
problem is what QR have only “First class” awards to AUH/DXB/MCT
try SLL which have J award
Thanks! Forgot about that. I think you’re correct about that.
Thanks! I forgot about that and believe you’re correct.
While I had hoped for award prices that were lower than American’s given that Alaska is both smaller and has a substantially inferior domestic feeder network for Qatar flights, I certainly didn’t expect rates that would actually be higher.
Yeah. This doesn’t make any sense and makes me wonder how disappointed we might end up when they release a comprehensive award chart.
Yeah, a bad sign clearly.
I’m also wondering. Can AS keep its system of individual charts for every partner? We assumed by default that since AS joins OW it would introduce a global chart without routes limitation. But really… No-one promised us so.
It looks like they limit eligible for redemption routes with QR as they alway did. So It might be we’ll get the same for every single OW partner.
Sorry guys, those who use credit card signup and other tricks to get an unfair amount of points won’t be able to hack their way to Easy Business class tickets with Qatar Airways.
This is a great thing for the vast majority of Qatar Airways paying customers who don’t happen to have access to these credit card Bonus signup’s
This is just ridiculous, I pay but also redem my QR and other flights (I’m not stupid). I just use also other FF program included QR as Gold and Alaska..
Now what the use of these Alaska Miles with so much worldwide restrictions ? can’t burn them easily at least for customer outside US…
Hopefully I did not credit my recent business long haul to Alaska….
Yes another Award Partner with NO First Class Awards
Qatar has cheap biz class tickets. Booked round trip biz class from NA to Africa for 2600. Bargain.
Seems this is an echo of the much higher-priced EK awards when that ME3 carrier was a partner. As for Asian QR Customer, while I share your disdain about US credit card sign-up bonuses for airline partner cards, AS’s has never really been as generous as other carriers’ credit card sign-up bonuses. Nor is it a transfer partner of those bank cards that do.
Way to be an acronym geek.