FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Qatar Airways - UAE, KSA, Bahrain and Egypt withdraw licenses and close airspace
Old Jul 14, 2017, 9:49 pm
  #1141  
robbo755
 
Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: UK now Melbourne
Programs: QF Plat (OWE)
Posts: 74
Been reading this thread with great interest and found some useful data points so I thought I would provide an update on my situation.

I had a set of itineraries as follows:

Early August:
Itin 1 (J): CAI-DOH-BKK/<2 days>/BKK-DOH-CAI <one night turn>
Itin 2 (J): CAI-DOH-LHR/<3 weeks>/CPH-DOH-CAI <one night turn>
Itin 3 (F): CAI-DOH-BKK

Without going into all the detail, I decided to change all CAI originating/destination points to KWI.

I am currently residing in Australia so tried that call centre (India?) first. Utterly useless, avoid. Even after changing the first two itins I tried them as a test case for the final itin 3 - denied.

I then tried the UK call centre (Bahrain?). They were slightly better but ultimately would not change to the flights I specifically required.

Both these call centres had to put me on hold to go and get advice (which was completely contradictory in most cases).

I then tried the 24hr Qatar call centre. They were great and once they understood the changes I was proposing made the changes immediately. Also their English was far better.

The changes included:

* the originating change from CAI to KWI
* date changes
* immediate turns in KWI allowed
* o/n in DOH allowed (with some resistance due to married segment logic - interestingly I was booked into the higher fare class on some of the flights to obtain the o/n)
* change from CPH to LHR when leaving out of Europe (saved me 9k Avios)

So the updated itins look like:

Itin 1: KWI-DOH-BKK/<2 days>/BKK-DOH-KWI <immediate turn>
Itin 2: KWI-DOH-<o/n> -LHR <3 weeks> LHR-DOH <o/n>-KWI <immediate turn>
Itin 3: KWI-DOH-BKK

Interestingly I was able to get the free visa and free night on one of the DOH o/n's (not both). I also got a mistake upgrade from J to F somewhere along the line as well

I wasn't interested in this but as a datapoint they offered me TK CAI-IST-XXX, even one month out.

All invol reroutes so I should be able to claim ORC on the difference between CAI-DOH and KWI-DOH.

Hope this helps.
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