Airlines

My wife and I flew Qatar Airways business class from Karachi to San Francisco in April 2021. It was during pandemic but after vaccines were out. We went (we took Turkish on the way out) exactly two weeks after getting our shots. I used American Airlines miles to book this ticket, it cost 70k points.

This journey consisted of two legs: Karachi to Doha on a 787 Dreamliner and Doha to San Francisco on a A350-1000. The second leg is equipped with Q-Suites, widely reputed to be the best biz class around (spoiler alert: I agree).

787 - KHI to DOH

1-2-1 configuration, we took the middle two seats. The seating was modern, spacious and comfortable. Crew was great. We flew during ramadan and they made a suhoor announcement so that people could start their fast on time (we elected not to fast on that day because we were traveling…

We flew Turkish from San Francisco to Karachi via Istanbul back in September. We used Chase points to directly purchase on the Chase travel site. That was cheaper than transferring points to (say) United and then getting the ticket using Mileage Plus. The ticket was just over $900 which included a stop over in Istanbul on the way back.

I've covered Turkish before so I'll only highlight that things that stood out.

Infotainment

They have forward and downward cameras, which come in handy when you're looking for dawn, sunrise etc. And their navigation explicitly provides Qibla direction and the upcoming prayer time. This is great. Except it is for the current location, not here you'll be when dawn actually breaks. So doesn't take into account time compression when flying eastwards. But then I have not seen any infotainment provide that so this is state of the art.

Food

I flew Virgin Atlantic from San Francisco to London back in May. Used Delta points for the flight, it cost 35k points which is not bad. Sometimes it can be much higher than that.

Overall

I was distinctly unimpressed with this flight.

Seats

The seats were mediocre, there was something about lumbar support or something that was digging into my back and I just couldn't get comfortable. I got a whole three seater so could lie down to sleep on a red eye but still couldn't get fully comfortable with the belt anchors and the immovable armrest by the window. Leg room and seat width weren't great.

Last week, I flew from Chicago to Istanbul in Turkish Airlines business class. This was one leg of a journey from SFO to KHI. We used United miles to get the ticket which cost us 80k points back in March when we got it. The prices seem to have skyrocketed, currently, United doesn't offer SFO -> KHI for less than 300k points in business class. Our journey included a first class leg on United from SFO to ORD (domestic first class in a 737-900 is almost entirely forgettable) and Turkish 330-300 on the IST to KHI leg, which is somewhat comparable to the 777-300ER we had on the ORD to IST leg.

This seemed to an older aircraft. We've flown Turkish many times from SFO and LAX and those legs appear to have newer planes. This is manifested as older seats, older infotainment etc. Turkish has decided we are in…