Qatar Airways to acquire 25% of Virgin Australia

[bernardblack]

The interesting thing that I'm seeing is that, for awards 11-12 months out (and not including Qatar's "Flex" awards which are in plentiful supply), Velocity actually seems to have greater award availability than Privilege Club at the moment. I might be wrong (I haven't spent hours trawling through award availability), but Virgin's wetleased Qatar flights seem to be available to Velocity members only.

One example: searching for MEL-IST on March 5 next year brings up this using Velocity points:

View attachment 438762
But on Qatar's website using Avios, that same flight isn't available and the only options are the more expensive "Flex" awards:

View attachment 438772

So if you're right about Qatar [Privilege Club] having almost no awards, I'm not sure you could say the same thing about Velocity.

Something I observed in Jan when the VA-coded awards began to be released, was that QRPC seems to only show combo itineraries with all-QR or all-VA codes, and not a mixture. (That was based on a small sample so it may be more complex than that.)

Given that the DOH<>Europe/America/Africa award space is all QR-coded, and more recently there is very little QR-coded out of Australia (but there seems to routinely be VA-coded space, at least where I'm checking at the end of the calendar), that might be why.

Possibly check departures from ADL or CBR, which will necessarily produce a QR-coded flight (and are occasionally available).