Originally Posted by Dr. HFH

Following up on this post, it was an interesting experience. Surprisingly, there was a fair amount of regular priced (i.e., not Q2) award space available in both directions between DOH and the U.S. over the Christmas holidays, at what I would have thought would be prime times for demand, and when they might have pulled all award availability because it's the holidays. I got regular priced J awards BKK-DOH-BOS leaving on December 21, and IAD-DOH-BKK leaving on January 2. (I didn't check every U.S. city, but there was also regular priced award availability LAX-DOH on January 2.) For my January 2 travel, both are QSuite flights. Flights from BOS to IAD can be had on B6 fairly cheaply; and I'm even considering Amtrak!

The website definitely needs more testing and debugging. For example, when I search for one-way availability, a warning message first flashes up for a fraction of a second telling me that the departure date must be before the arrival date. No idea what that means, -- once a flight departs, the date/time of arrival is pretty much out of the passenger's control. That happened repeatedly, so it wasn't a one-off. I have another flight that I'm trying to cancel, but it doesn't work. I'll call QRPC after I finish writing this post. Seat selection went smoothly, no problems.

All-in-all, I must say that while QR does have its problems with ground CS, they do seem to be making some progress, at least based on my experience over the past few days. Clearly QR still has a long way to go; but maybe it really is starting to get its act together. One never knows!