Qatar Privilege Club My List: What's Changing

Starting June 2026, you'll only be able to use your Avios to book award flights for a small named circle of people. The change is framed as a convenience feature. The real reason is more complicated.

If you got an email from Qatar Airways Privilege Club this week announcing something called "My List," you might have read it as a minor quality-of-life improvement — a way to save frequent travel companions' details for faster booking. That part is true. But buried underneath the friendly framing is a meaningful restriction on how Avios can be used, and it's worth understanding what's actually changing and why.

What My List Is

My List is a new Privilege Club feature launching in June 2026 that lets you create a personal list of trusted members for whom you can spend your Avios on award flights. Once you invite an existing Privilege Club member to your list and they accept, their details are automatically saved to your account — eliminating the need to manually enter their information every time you want to book a ticket on their behalf.

The process is straightforward:

• You can add up to four Privilege Club members to your personal list
• You can be on one other Privilege Club member's list in return
• The people on your list must already be Privilege Club members — you can't add a non-member
• Once added, their profile is stored for future bookings

Qatar is also running this alongside the existing Family & Friends programme, which allows up to six non-Privilege Club nominees. Combined, that caps the total universe of people you can book award flights for at ten named individuals.

That last sentence is the important one. It's a hard limit.

What This Actually Restricts

Before June 2026, you could use your Avios to book an award flight for essentially anyone — you just needed their name and passport details at the time of booking. A friend, a colleague, a relative you see twice a year. If you've been using your Avios to occasionally help out a cousin, a colleague, or a friend who messaged you the night before a fare opened up, that era is over.

The classic scenario — a family member has an emergency and needs to fly tomorrow, let me book them a ticket on Avios — is now impossible unless they were already on your list months ago. The flexibility that made Avios genuinely useful in unplanned situations is gone for anyone outside your pre-registered list.

The Real Reason: Account Theft and the Broker Problem

Qatar is framing this as a security enhancement and a smoother booking experience. Both things are true, but the fuller picture involves a wave of account compromises that has been hammering the loyalty program ecosystem for the past two years.

There has been a sustained pattern of account theft in which hackers gain access to loyalty program accounts — via credential stuffing, phishing, or leaked passwords from unrelated breaches. Forum threads on FlyerTalk are full of cases of 200,000, 300,000, and even nearly 500,000 Avios being lifted in a single move.

The pathway worked precisely because you could book for any name. A hacker gets into a account, uses or transfers the miles, then books an award ticket for a name they control. My List closes that specific pathway — even if a hacker compromises your account, they can only redeem for people already on your list. They can't add someone new and immediately burn the balance, because any new invitee has to accept the invitation, which triggers a notification to the account holder.

The second thing My List addresses is the grey market for Avios bookings, where people with large balances sell award tickets to strangers for cash. That's a terms-of-service violation, and the List system closes the resale exit for anyone running that kind of operation.

Does It Actually Fix the Problem?

Partially. My List makes it significantly harder to set up new fraudulent redemptions. But it doesn't fully protect mature accounts that get breached — if a hacker compromises an account that already has a populated list, and any of those list members are themselves controlled accounts in a fraud ring, the theft still works.

For context, Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer has long required nominee registration before redeeming for others.

What You Should Do Before June

If you regularly book award flights for family members or a travel partner, set up your list as soon as the feature goes live. The process requires the other person to already be a Privilege Club member — if they aren't, now is the time to get them signed up.

Think carefully about who your four slots are for. You can be on one other person's list in return, but you can't be on multiple lists simultaneously — so if you and a partner both want to be able to book for each other and for parents, the math gets tight quickly.

If you're the kind of Privilege Club member who holds a large Avios balance and occasionally helps friends or extended contacts book award flights — that flexibility is gone in June. Plan accordingly.

The Bigger Picture for Avios Holders

Privilege Club remains one of the most valuable programs for booking Qsuites and partner awards. Qatar continues to waive carrier-imposed surcharges when booking with Avios, meaning you pay taxes only — one of the more member-friendly policies in the industry.

But the program is clearly tightening up how Avios flow. Between the account theft wave and the broker market, the open redemption model was being exploited in ways that ultimately cost legitimate members. My List is the response — a reasonable one, but with a real tradeoff for anyone who valued the previous flexibility.

Will this help reduce account takeovers and mileage brokering? Only time will tell.

Related: NRT–DOH: Qatar Airways 787-9 Qsuites Review · DOH–CPH: Qatar Airways Qsuites Mini Review