Several weeks ago, Qatar Airways Privilege Club launched “My Reward Seat Finder,” a new tool that’s supposed to efficiently show Qatar Airways award availability across an entire year, on your choice of routes.

It’s a huge value-add when airlines make it easy to search award availability, so I was excited when I saw this. Unfortunately the execution leaves quite a bit to be desired.

How Qatar Airways’ Reward Seat Finder works

The Qatar Airways Privilege Club program has become increasingly useful over time, both for redemptions on Qatar Airways, and for awards on partner airlines. The airline has made the booking process for awards easier, and Privilege Club is now a program I use all the time.

So, does Qatar Airways’ Reward Seat Finder make booking awards on the airline any easier? The airline markets it as a way to easily search award availability up to one year in advance, allowing you to see all the options for an entire calendar month at a glance. Unfortunately it’s not quite as useful as it sounds, though.

The execution here is really weak, if you ask me:

• It’s kind of annoying to have to log into your Privilege Club account to use this feature, since you’d think they’d make it easy for anyone to just browse availability, to get a sense of the program’s value; however, this is the least annoying part
• What’s super annoying is that the search results don’t actually just show premium results if you select that option, and instead you’ll also see economy options, with no easy indication as to which cabin the pricing is for
• Since Qatar Airways has both Saver and Flexi awards, Flexi economy is often priced the same as Saver business class, which complicates this even further
• Then if you actually want to select specific dates to see what’s available, you need to have at least 50% of the Avios required for the ticket in your account

Let me demonstrate this in the form for an example. You can access the Reward Seat Finder at this link. Once logged into your account, you’ll find the search function, which is easy… in theory. You just enter your origin, destination, the month you want to travel, how many travelers there are, and the cabin you’re looking at.

The problem is, even if you search for a premium ticket, economy seats will return in the results, if that’s the cheapest priced award.

If you get to a month where you see higher priced awards, you might think “great, that 70,000 Avios price must be for business class.”

But then you may very well be disappointed, and find that’s just the Flexi award availability in economy.

Finding Qatar Airways economy award availability is generally very easy, which is why I find this to be of limited use. A calendar like this is needed when awards are rarer, as is the case in premium cabins.

This has potential, but isn’t currently valuable

I’d absolutely love if Qatar Airways could rework this feature and make it actually useful, as it would be a huge asset to the program. For example, Virgin Atlantic has a similar Reward Seat Checker feature, which is the perfect execution of this concept. It doesn’t require logging in, and it clearly shows the lowest cost for travel in each cabin on each day.

Bottom line

While I appreciate that Qatar Airways introduced a Reward Seat Finder feature, the execution isn’t as good as I was hoping when the concept was first announced. In particular, the search tool doesn’t let you filter between economy and premium cabins, despite purporting to do so. Furthermore, you need at least 50% of the Avios required in order to actually view available flights.

If this worked properly, it would be an awesome feature. So consider this a gentle nudge to Privilege Club to maybe get this working properly, so that it can be an asset to the program.

What do you make of Qatar Airways’ Reward Seat Finder? Anyone have a different take?