Older is better? Qatar Airways Business Class from Doha to Cape Town aboard the A350-900 👑

Booking Qatar Airways Business Class with Points

We booked two Qatar Airways flights with American Airline miles for 55k + $320 ( roughly $350 later this year )- which flew us on the 787 featuring their updated QSuite, and then their older Super Diamond business class on the A350-900. First off, the original QSuite, which you can read about here, is the best Qatar Business Class product by far. The surprisingly thing to me was that I preferred this older, more open A350-900 Qatar Business Class to the newer, narrower, 787 Business Suite product.

This is a little bit later this year on the same route

Getting the AA Miles

• Bask Bank Account
  • I have one and earn AA miles every month
• Citi/Barclay Credit Cards
  • Make sure you check my spreadsheet for best deals
  • Rumor is Citi will soon onboard AA again as a transfer partner
  • Barclay will also soon no longer be a cobrand card issuer
• Shopping Portals, etc
  • Go here to learn about them

Other ways of Booking aside from AA

The easiest alternative is to book with Avios ( either British Airways or Qatar Airways ). Remember you can merge Avios between accounts: BA, Qatar, Iberia, Aer Lingus very easily, so when a bank like Chase or Amex has a 30 or 40% transfer bonus you can utilize them within any airlines via a merge.

Read about how to do that here.

For the sake of making things easy, I’ll just show you what it looks like on Qatar Airways since they show the most space for their own members. It’s 75k Avios and 370 pounds. Of course you could book with Cathay Asia Miles or Alaska Mileage Plan as well

This video breaks it down very clearly at the end as well.

Check-in Experience

We were transiting and spent the night at the Park Hyatt Doha for $170 so our bags had already been checked through.

Since we already had boarding passes we veered left and sailed through to security

Business Class Lounge ( Al Mourjan )

This is one of the nicest business class lounges in the world, and thankfully, they allow passengers ticketed on partner award tickets to enter. There was a brief period during the pandemic where this wasn’t the case, but it’s back available. We headed upstairs to the restaurant to have a quick bite of breakfast since we didn’t have it at the hotel.

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Boarding

We actually boarded from a remote where we needed to hop on a bus. I’d lost track of time briefly and we nearly missed our flight! When we entered the cabin it was nearly full

Seat Features and Layout

The A350-900 cabin is split into two sections, but you’re all in the same cabin. This is different than other aircraft that have a galley in between and if you select the mini cabin you’re actually in a separate section. As you can see we were in the smaller portion in the rear most seats. My fave.

Seat Storage

I love cubbies in business class. A place to put my valuables, store cables, phone, camera, etc. This seat really hit a home run. The first row in the mini section also features a small cabinet next to the tv.

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Bed Mode

Super, duper comfortable. I’d argue that this seat offers one of the best business class beds in the sky when it comes to comfort of the cushioning and width around the shoulders. I’m not a big guy by any means ( roughly 6′ tall and 165-170lbs ) but I often find I don’t have much shoulder space when the bed is flat, and that the pieces of the seat poke my back in awkward places. I experience none of that. They also provide a two pillows and nice comforter which I happily made use of even though it was a day flight.

Amenity Kit

Small Diptyque amenity kit ( no pajamas since it was a day flight )

In-Flight Dining Experience

Dining is on demand and delicious and Qatar is always in the conversation as having the best onboard meal experiences.

Entertainment System and Connectivity

Miles kicked back, as did I and we enjoyed a few good movies.

There is also free WiFi which was fast enough to surf a few web pages but definitely not stream.

There was a single place to plug your devices – comparing this to the newer business class products where you’ll have multiple places to charge is underwhelming, but I always travel with a multi plug from Anker so I didn’t really affect me much.

Conclusion

Shockingly, I preferred this to the newer Business Suites that we flew from Manchester to Doha. While this plane has definitely seen a lot more usage and miles, I preferred the open cabin, wider, softer, and overall more comfortable seats to those we flew on the 787.