All right, once again, I know this isn’t a travel blog, but it’s a irelevant weekend blog post, and it’s my blog so I’m kind of allowed to do whatever I want.
It’s kind of funny – I honestly (as a lot of my friends know) don’t really care for flying too much, yet I find myself doing a lot more of it recently. Now that I’ve agreed to speak at the GISEC Conference in Dubai next month, obviously I’m flying to the Middle East.
When I was looking at flight options, one thing that a few people know about but I wanted to share here is Qatar Airways. Obviously we have Etihad as an option and Emirates, etc., but Qatar does something different.
In 2022, very controversially (Netflix did a documentary talking about it), Qatar hosted the World Cup. If you think about that, they needed a ton of hotels – far more than they had before. So they built a ton of hotels. Now Qatar has a ridiculous amount of extremely nice hotels, and they obviously would love to have visitors come to their country.
Qatar Airways actually does something really cool: they have a stopover program. If you travel through Doha, there is a thing you can do to extend your layover in Doha. It sounds kind of crazy, right? Like, who wants to actually extend a layover? But you can extend a layover up to four days, and they will heavily subsidize your hotel for that.
It’s kind of cool – they have four options. It starts off with a 4-star hotel that starts at $14 a night. Yes, that cheap! That’s how heavily subsidized it is. Then it’s like premium, then premium beach, then luxury, which starts off at like $100 or $50 a night or something like that.
It’s just kind of crazy. I was telling a few friends about it and only a couple knew, so next time you’re flying to and through the Middle East, if Qatar Airways is an option for your flight and you have the time and you’re interested, it’s one of those things where you’re not sure when (if ever) you would visit Qatar again – at least I wasn’t – so take the chance to explore Doha for a few days.
