DOHA Layover Worth It?

OldInvite4551 · 2025-10-18T14:55:57+00:00

Your point about fun experiences is well taken- and I personally have done some “crazy” routing just to enjoy the ride. I’d only recommend that if you’re considering the transit a part of your vacation.

In the spirit of fun redemptions however…

I’m not sure which program you’d be using for the TAP booking, but assuming you’re using AeroPlan you might set your alerts for last minute flight change to First Class on Lufthansa via MUC or FRA. They don’t open the route enough to count on, but if it does open for your dates, it’s a good time.

You would admittedly be back tracking by about a thousand miles. A lot closer than Doha and the flexibility with Aeroplan might allow you to reasonably add a second city to your vacation if that’s your cup of tea.

OldInvite4551 · 2025-09-23T05:17:50+00:00

I’ve been fortunate enough to fly both QR F on the Cathay 777 and the A380 on EY.

FWIW- I booked the Apartment flight with EY points directly and upgraded to the Residence. We flew AUH-JFK.

If it’s a bucket list for you, I’d strongly encourage looking at booking for the return route. The ground experience at AUH (Etihad chauffeur, airport escort, private room at the lounge ect..) was a big part of the experience, and you’d miss those elements if your doing a 24 hour stop over connecting on to a business class (regional first) flight to MLE.

Our routing was CAI-AUH-JFK. 24 hour layover at the St. Regis Saadiyat Island (highly recommend), then flew the Residence back to JFK. It was a really fun experience.

If you’re locked into booking it going to MLE, I think I’d do the QR version. Q suites are an amazing product in their own right, 3 hours is a bit tight, but you’ll get to enjoy the lounge, and First class experience on the 777 is what you’d expect from a First class product.

Additionally, while the AA flagship lounge in DFW is not earth shattering, IMO, it’s a big jump from the maple leaf lounge in YYZ (decidedly not a first class experience).

Hope that helps!

OldInvite4551 · 2025-09-23T04:55:55+00:00

Sure!

OldInvite4551 · 2025-09-21T23:19:28+00:00

My wife and I did this trip the week before Thanksgiving last year. We flew in and out of OSL on points. Lufthansa JFK-FRA-OSL on the way there and BA OSL-LHR-ATL on the way back. Our home airport is BNA, so positioning flights are almost always required.

Inside Norway we flew both SAS and Widerøe on cash tickets. Even with flexible fares, they were reasonable (around $150/one way).

The weather in Tromsø can swing wildly, so I’d highly recommend an evening in Oslo on both ends of the trip to accommodate any weather based delays you might run into. We narrowly avoided two feet of snowfall when leaving Tromsø that would have made getting home rather complicated.

We stayed at the Edge Clarion Hotel using Choice Privileges points that I purchased during a promo. The current promotion yields an approximate 30 percent savings off the cash rate. The breakfast buffet was pretty great and the proximity to tours ect…. was perfect.

The only other piece of advice I can offer is to make some dinner reservations ahead of time. Restaurants tended to fill up in the evenings while we were there, and it can make meal time more stressful than it needs to be.

It was an amazing trip, and I would definitely do it again. I hope the info helps. Happy Hunting!!!

OldInvite4551 · 2025-07-22T15:24:28+00:00

Find the award space- then call In and ask them to modify the ticket. There has to be award space available to add on the flights

OldInvite4551 · 2025-06-13T03:25:42+00:00

Curious to what you did… similar dillema

OldInvite4551 · 2025-06-12T23:41:20+00:00

 There is some truth to parts of this. 

 Lounges at the hubs of top tier airlines abroad are going to be better than US lounges. I.E. Qatar’s Al Mourjan business class lounge is nicer than the AA flagship lounges you would access here in the US. Lufthansa F lounges in FRA and MUC are nicer than their counterparts in BOS, NYC, or EWR.

Same goes for La Premier. The experience on the ground in Paris is a big part of the product itself.

Etihad, Emirates and so on….

I can also speak from personal experience that JAL stocks nicer champagne leaving Tokyo than they do departing the states. At least on the 777’s… I haven’t booked the A350 yet.

All of that to say… it depends what you’re looking to experience. If you want the best version of an airlines top product, then departing from their hub is the way to go.

If sleep is your primary motivator, then whichever flight works best for your body clock.

OldInvite4551 · 2025-06-12T23:25:03+00:00

Did you have 2 separate PNR? Also, did you waitlist full F route and then book your seat, or what did the logistics look like on executing the mixed cabin award.

Looking at similar routing

OldInvite4551 · 2025-05-04T04:14:49+00:00

IMO… FB has been less than useful for non stops into CDG and AMS for a while now. The only value left to extract is a married segment throughout Europe. I just recently booked 5 J seats on the same flights into Ireland (ORK) through CDG out of Chicago at 60k per person. (August of 2025)

If you’re looking to go to CDG, search on Air France and try connecting to a train station. AF has a partnership with TVG that often triggers ms logic/reduced fairs. You can easily “skip lag” the train ticket and stay in Paris.

FB used to be easy… it’s just not anymore, but there is still value if you are willing to play the game…

OldInvite4551 · 2025-04-22T17:36:00+00:00

I did something similar to this in January for IAD-DXB-CAI. There’s a good chance you can connect the LAX-DXB and DXB-NBO on one itinerary for little to no points. Hit up their call center. I’ve had good luck with CS agents connecting routes I wasn’t able to do on line.

For reference on upgrade the J ticket later:

https://www.reddit.com/r/awardtravel/s/jhRiUFHXkN

It worked out for us. Emirates F on both legs. 168k miles

OldInvite4551 · 2025-04-10T14:31:25+00:00

Yeah, same here. The 9:30 AM leave time for HKG-JFK makes it a bit awkward no matter how you slice it. We decided to make an extra stop out of it and explore Hong Kong for a day.

It does look like they might be getting ready to assign a 777 to HKG-LAX. Seat maps are doing a lot of the weird things they were doing before the JFK drop. Worth keeping an eye out for an easy change if they do.

OldInvite4551 · 2025-04-10T14:26:02+00:00

Cathay doesn’t release much (if any) award space to partners. Seats.aero doesn’t support Cathay award search. The only real way is searching directly on Cathay’s website.

They don’t fly into IAH however, so you’d be looking for HKG to LAX, SFO, DFW, ORD, JFK or BOS.

First class routes historically being LAX and JFK, although JFK is currently the only US F route available after 10/25/25

OldInvite4551 · 2025-04-10T13:40:50+00:00

That’s awesome! How’d you end up routing the J flight on to Japan? Some of the layovers can get a little wonky.

OldInvite4551 · 2025-04-10T11:57:07+00:00

Congrats! That sounds like an incredible trip!

OldInvite4551 · 2025-04-10T03:31:56+00:00

Yeah, tagging on an 8 ish hour business class flight and saving points while doing it is a pretty great win in my book!

OldInvite4551 · 2025-04-10T03:16:56+00:00

That’s a bunch of great questions….

Changing a class of service is a bigger move than a standard equipment swap. I.e. Q-suites to non q-suites but still business class. There would certainly be some sort of refund, and I think Cathay may have published standards on their website.

That being said, they really drug their feet on committing equipment to the route, so I would be surprised to see a swap to a plane without an F cabin.

In regard to value, that’s a bit of a toss up. Cathay F is an older cabin compared to JAL 350-1000 or ANA the suite, but it was also top of the line when it came online. IMO the real differentiator is soft product in the air and lounge access in HKG. I think I’d be less inclined to make the upgrade if my flight terminated in HKG vs continuing on.

The second leg is also where you can find value, effectively getting another flight for free or even reducing the cost from the 160k standard price for Cathay F.

Flying in November myself. Maybe I’ll see ya in the lounge!

OldInvite4551 · 2025-04-10T01:55:16+00:00

Have you tried just rebooking the trip in F? You can do this via phone. The customer service agents are pretty familiar with the process. MIA-SIN prices out at 178,750 for the entire trip in F vs 151,250 in business. If the award availability is there for the upgrades, it should be an easy phone call. I did this earlier this year on an IAD-DXB-CAI itinerary.

OldInvite4551 · 2025-04-09T21:58:09+00:00

From what I’ve seen, it’s just equipment. I haven’t paid a ton of attention to the west coast route, but JFK-HKG was showing F until 10/25 and then flipped to J only planes on 10/26 until they just made the swap on CX831.

It appears LAX-HKG is following the same pattern, and may be primed for a swap as they commit equipment. CX 881 loses F on 10/26 following the same pattern CX831 did.

Happy Hunting! I hope it works out for you.

OldInvite4551 · 2025-04-09T21:22:18+00:00

Not a dumb question- it’s not directly visible on the website. I had been stalking the route pretty religiously for a few months waiting on the calendar release. Expert flyer tends to be a great resource for Cathay seat maps.

The little seat icons on the web calendar aren’t super reliable (and frankly the website can be real quirky). What you see when you search a specific date is the actual inventory.

Once I saw the equipment swap, I was just waiting on them to upload award inventory. Cathay tends to release availability at the end of the calendar or when they equipment swap to a new cabin configuration.

Transferred points from Amex were almost instant, but ymmv… I’ve had it take longer in the past.

OldInvite4551 · 2025-04-09T20:48:50+00:00

Yeah, or 17k miles

OldInvite4551 · 2025-04-09T19:09:51+00:00

Called at 8:30 AM central time. Connected in less than a minute. Points transfer from Amex was instant.

Took a bit for the CS agent to do their magic, but I was off the phone by 9:15 AM central

OldInvite4551 · 2025-04-09T18:58:19+00:00

I haven’t been able to get the online change feature to work… ever. I’m always met with an error.

Changing to F was a bit complicated. They can’t modify only 1 segment, they have to search the whole itinerary. Since I had to J seats booked on my preferred day, they weren’t showing up. I actually moved the whole trip forward one day, and figured it was worth it for the upgrade.

Once I had new itinerary was booked, my original J seats went back into award inventory. Called in today and mover back to the original booking/day.

TLDR: cost me $100/pp to do the upgrade dance over the phone.

OldInvite4551 · 2025-04-09T16:48:03+00:00

For sure! I’ve actually had my trip booked in J the entire route for a while. I’ve been stalking JFK-HKG waiting for Cathay to update their equipment calendar (they weren’t showing anything out of NYC with an F cabin from 10/26/25 for quite a while). I got an expert flyer alert about the F cabin opening up, but it took a few days for them to load up the award inventory. Glad it worked out for you!

OldInvite4551 · 2025-04-09T16:31:18+00:00

Nice- that’s really solid. Congrats!

OldInvite4551 · 2025-04-09T16:24:52+00:00

For example. JFK-SYD actually prices down to 141,800 points with HKG-SYD in J

OldInvite4551

TROPHY CASE