Qatar Airways Quietly Removes Award Seat Discount for Gold & Platinum Members
The 5% award flight discount for Gold & Platinum members has been removed, effective immediately.
Qatar Airways Privilege Club offers its elite members a unique and rather valuable benefit—or at least, it used to. The benefit in question was a 5% discount on all award bookings made using Qatar Airways Avios (on Qatar Airways operated flights).
Both Qatar Airways Privilege Club Gold and Platinum members received this discount on both Saver and Flexi award bookings in any class of travel. I’d go as far as to say it was by far the best feature of being either Gold or Platinum with Qatar.
It’s disappointing to see that Qatar Airways doesn’t seem to care about communicating this devaluation to its members. At least, I’ve seen no communication on the subject, and it has been completely removed from the list of benefits.
You can still find references to the benefit on their FAQ pages about program changes from a few years ago.
Devaluation Track Record
Qatar Airways Privilege Club has somewhat of a track record when it comes to making changes to its program without notice. Back in 2018, it raised award prices by at least 45% overnight, with zero notice to members.
This was later reversed in 2020—again, with no notice. While the reversal was positive, it still came completely out of the blue.
More recently we saw a devaluation in award fees with no notice, although this was days later reversed somewhat.
When airlines and their award programs act erratically like this, it makes it very hard to put much faith in the program as a whole. Imagine working all year towards Privilege Club Gold or Platinum, only to have the goalposts moved without warning.
It makes you wonder if another devaluation might be on the cards. For that reason, I would probably keep my points out of Avios unless there’s an immediate redemption in my travel plans.
Summing Up
Don’t get me wrong—the Privilege Club program is actually pretty good right now. Qatar Airways releases a lot of reward seats for its members, and although many of them are Flexi fares, Saver business class flights aren’t as rare as they are with competitors like Qantas.
I fly Qatar a fair bit, having retained Platinum in the last few years, and it’s certainly one of my preferred redemption airlines—especially for the 5% discount. So, it’s disappointing to see this benefit pulled.
