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A week scarcely passes without a Qatar Airways bargain Business Class fare. The latest is from Venice to Bangkok, with fares starting at £1,075 Return.
Availability looks excellent, and the fare should be available right through to May 2018. 
It’s easy to search for dates on ITA Matrix, Google Flights, or just on the Qatar Airways site itself.
If you would like to take advantage, don’t wait too long as the fare is scheduled to get pulled on 30th June 2017.
I don’t live in Venice…
True – but it’s very cheap and easy to get there these days (Ryanair flights start at £9.99!).
Also: it’s Venice. Spend a day or two en route – you won’t regret it!
Craig has written a great piece on ‘positioning’ to take advantage of cheap fares, what the possible pitfalls are and how to avoid them.
Anything else?
You can earn ~ 14,750 Avios and (almost) qualify for British Airways Silver status by crediting these flights to British Airways Executive Club. We covered this in detail for a previous sale – have a read because all the essential elements are the same even if the specific examples are different.
Qatar has also recently introduced a free stopover service including a night in Doha at a 4*-5* hotel.
Qatar Airways Bargain Bottom line
£1,075 doesn’t match some of the unbelievable fares we’ve seen from Qatar Airways over the last couple of years to Asia, but it’s still a very good price for a very solid Business Class product.
Racking up a decent chunk of Avios and a load of BA Tier Points doesn’t hurt either! Rich wrote over the weekend about how it’s actually possible to get BA Executive Club elite status without actually flying with British Airways at all – which was news to a lot of us! I’d strongly recommend having a read if you missed it.
The Ryanair flight is to Venice Treviso, which is a taxi or train ride away from Marco Polo. So don’t leave a tight connection!
Excellent point!
Amazing deal again! Reposition using a small amount of Avios on RFS and fee.
These deals on better quality airlines can make using Avios on BA LH redemptions virtually worthless with average taxes coming in for two at £1100 and needing 200 – 250k avios for similar flights.
Yep, even without the incredible sub £800 deals, Qatar can still make Avios appear a bit useless for long haul Premium travel. The new Q Suites look at least as good as BA First too, particularly if you are travelling with someone. Avios are still great for Iberia Business Class to the Americas though and many other things.
The BAPP 2-4-1 voucher still trumps everything though, I presume?
I intend to “trash” the 2-4-1 voucher during a series I’m planning for this summer. But I haven’t done all of the math and analysis yet so my starting assumption might be quite wrong… 🙂
I look forward to that Craig.
To be honest, the Companion Voucher has its immense limitations, but if used in good (eg A380) Business Class or First Class long-haul, for a couple who live in the UK and can earn cheap Avios easily, it can definitely work very well.
I say that as someone with a Companion Voucher and Avios mountain, currently booking long-haul flights for which it is proving utterly useless, too, so I am certainly being objective.
The only way I now see the 2-4-1 voucher being any better than snapping up the best of the deals available from Gulf carriers is on very expensive first class long haul routes. BA’s club world just doesn’t compete with a number of airlines anymore so the quality of the experience & cabin need to be factored in somehow and in this case BA lose out.
Thanks guys. Let’s see where I get to… I’m sure if my math doesn’t quite add up, I can always throw in a “wouldn’t you pay an extra £100 to fly Cathay Pacific or Etihad F?” 🙂
It would also be an interesting survey in perceptions… Is the gap between BA F and the best of the competition greater than the gap between BA J and the competition! BA lose in both cases surely. But it’s been so long since I’ve flown BA J that I’m almost nostalgically fond of my old 62A/K upstairs…
Very much looking forward to this – my ‘gut’ has said the same for a while now, but I’ve never got round to properly crunching the numbers.
I’m looking forward to that. I’m currently on course to get mine in a couple of months, but interested to hear whether it’s actually value for money.
Sad it’s not the £600-800 we used to see 🙁
How is the duration of the flight effected by the air space shenanigans ?
Indeed – hopefully they will be back at some point! Flight time looked ok actually – (from memory) 5.30 to Doha, then 6:30 to Bangkok. There was some really tight connections too, so technically could be done in about 13 hours, according to the schedule. The reality, of course, may be a little different.
Treviso is a horrible tiny airport with the most expensive shops ever airside, and is an hour by coach from Venice.
Easyjet fly to Marco-polo though ?
True, but Treviso itself is an extremely charming little town – well worth a night in its own right if you can squeeze it in. Same for Bergamo too for ‘Milan’. Ryanair’s uniquely loose interpretation of geography has led to me to discovering some great places I’d never otherwise have seen!
Try finding the car rental at Marco Polo and you’ll fall in love with Treviso all over again. VCE is a hideous airport.
I’ve recently burned a few 2-4-1 vouchers on club europe redemptions (£50 RFS) and probably will with my latest one too (on a positioning flight for a business class long haul sale fare with a compay with a much better business class seat, cabin, experience).
It is not a great use of a 2-4-1 voucher but I feel I can do better snapping up cash & mistake fares in biz or First from better airlines than trying like crazy to get some very limited redemption seats with BA. Of course those who do manage to get some of those first class redemptions will have a bloody great time and its what I intended to do when I started collecting Avios donkeys years ago.
Great point – factoring the time/planning it can take to use a 2-4-1 for a big value redemption is an important additional consideration. Personally, I don’t chase the 2-4-1 at all anymore, but would probably burn it on CE as you suggest, if I still did.
I started diversifying my Points/Miles earning a few years ago and save my Avios for Iberia off-peak Business and other high-value redemptions these days.