Qatar Airways decided to adopt the Avios platform that powers IAG airlines (British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus & Vueling), of which it owns a large chunk.
The move from Qmiles to Avios went live today, and you can now link your Privilege Club and Executive Club accounts and move Avios freely, without any fees, between them.
You can access Qatar Airways here.
When you log in to your Privilege Club, you are prompted to link your accounts with British Airways.
After linking the accounts, you can freely move Avios between and redeem from whichever program is more beneficial to you.
Airlines that use Avios (British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingis, Vueling & Qatar Airways) don’t have a common award chart or partners. It pays to check the number of Avios required and associated fees with more than one of the airlines.
Linking Accounts:
You will see a pop-up when logging into your Privilege Club to link your accounts.
There are some steps that you need to make.
You need to click the link on Qatar’s website, and it then takes you to BA’s website, which asks for an email address and password.
I’m not sure why BA asks me to secure my account by inputting a phone number and sending a text?
You then see a very long and complicated code that BA asks you to save somewhere.
Success! The name on these two accounts should match, but the email addresses don’t.
You are then presented with a dashboard that shows BA and Qatar Airways account balances.
You have options to combine, purchase or spend Avios.
I could have moved some of my Avios stash from BA to Qatar, but I didn’t.
Qatar sent a confirmation email that the account linkage had been successful.
As did BA.
Conclusion
The linking of accounts was relatively smooth, and it may open up possibilities on the redemption front in the future.
I would not use my Avios for anything other than award flights, certainly not for extra baggage charges or lounge passes.
It is excellent that you can consolidate balances from various Avios accounts that you may have. I had a small number of Qmiles in the past, but those have now expired.
