Will Qatar release award seats after cancellation?
 

I have a 2 segment Qatar flight on hold using my AA miles, but would like to book it using my friend's account. She won't have the miles for 5 more days. So ideally I would release the hold, have my friend hold it and then finalize after the miles post. Am I gambling that Qatar will release the award seats back into inventory after I cancel my hold?

There's no guarantee that the awards will come back into inventory. Unfortunately the only way to know is to cancel them and see what happens. So it's up to you if you want to take that risk or not.

You can try and extend the hold and pay from a different account. On AA this is possible but with QR not sure. I have seen QR seats go back to inventory but who knows?

The only way to "extend" a partner award hold is if the award is still available.

No, you cannot "extend the hold". The only way AA can extend the 5-day hold is if award seats are still available that they can hold as a new booking; or, of course, if the seats come back after being canceled. There's no guarantee.

For early summer 2020, for example, QR released seats (including lots of Y) and people were able to book them; then one day QR pulled all those available award seats and now there's nothing at all next summer. If you got one of those, and if you give them up, QR won't make them available again. May be the same with other date ranges.

No need to release it. The miles can be pulled from their account. The issue would be if wanting to change passenger name, thatI dont believe can be done without releasing.

The big issue seems to be that the other account will not have enough miles until after the end of the current hold

Misunderstood that part.i thought his account wouldn't have enough till after and thus why booking from the friends account.

Thank you for all for the advice.

In my one instance, after the hold expired, it took a day for me to see the award space again

Good to know. I'm sure I'll be refreshing every 5 minutes!

Yes you are absolutely gambling. There are factors at play during the 5 day hold which you have no visibility into:

1. More revenue seats could have been sold to the point QR doesn't warrant releasing an award seat.
2. If QR allows waitlisting by their own members, someone added themselves to the waitlist. Once you release the seat, the award, assuming it stays as an award, may get awarded to the waitlist.
3. The award seat, assuming it comes back, may not come back until days later; no guarantee it will be release immediately after cancelling.

My personal experience in booking QR award tickets is that the inventory invariably is available again if the seats are released after a hold. However, I've never seen the award seats become available again if I've issued the ticket and then several days later cancel it. My take is that QR releases a certain number of seats for awards and once they are snapped up, they are gone, even if customers eventually cancel the seats.

This is different from CX, where I typically find the award seats become available again after a cancellation. Of course, YMMV.

Interesting stuff. Thanks for the comments seawolf and jiaotze. I decided not to gamble and just book this with my account. I've never flown Q suites and don't want to chance it.

But wait, there's more. This is a return from South Africa, and for the outbound had 1 stop Etihad flights on hold. Both the website and an agent told me the hold would expire at 11:59PM my time (United States), but it appears the hold expired about noon yesterday. So I lost my 2 seats, and I realized it somewhere between 1 and 4 hours after it happened. Only 1 came back (to my knowledge), and I've put that on hold. There's tons of availability on the AUH-JNB segments but now I'll have to hope a seat becomes available to AUH from a North American gateway.

There are 2 things that will impact the hold - the time to which AA will maintain the hold and the ticketing time limit imposed by the airline on which the hold is made ; I would suspect that the TTL expired