Originally Posted by
ryann1491
Looking to purchase a business class (qsuite! Yay!!) one-way ticket from AMM to DUR in May. I have about 60,000 AMEX points that I would like to use for this purchase. What is the most cost effective way to do this? I have a few options that I can think of...
1. Purchase airfare on AMEX travel site, use all points and pay the difference on my Amex Platinum Card. (ticket cost is $2,005, points are 100:$1 I believe. So I would save $600)
2. Transfer AMEX points to qmiles (3:2 ratio), purchase flight through Qatar and pay difference (Qcalculator says that the flight would cost 87,000 which seems low to me. Not sure how accurate the Qcalculator is)
3. Transfer AMEX points to qmiles, purchase economy seat ($754) and upgrade using points through Qatar (Qcalculator says it would be 29,000-58,000pts depending on ticket class - O,T,N,Q,S, etc.)
Alternatively, I could book this flight in cash, collect the 5x points, and use the points to purchase other legs of my flight (I have 3 separate trips).
New to the whole points, transfers, upgrades world and would love any advice. Thanks in advance!
Does the Amex MR program in the country where your Amex account is located have any airline transfer partners that are also QR partners? Sometimes, booking an award seat with partner miles is cheaper than booking with miles of the airline actually operating the flight(s)!
You can use aa.com to see if QR is offering AMM-DOH-DUR award flights for when you wish to travel. No log-in is required on aa.com to do an award search. If QR is making award flights available to AA, then they probably are also making them available to their other partners, but you'd need to double-check.