Qatar Airways · CX evidence review

METHOD & SCOPE

How this study was run.

54 scored pairs: 39 exchanges in 20 virtual-user chats and 15 fixed attempts. The report records 56 messages in 37 chats including a pre-test and an unconfirmed delivery; the replacement conversation is identified separately.

These are hypothetical policy conversations, not completed customer transactions.

Paid and ticketed 10 hours ago: An unused non-refundable Qatar JFK–Doha Economy ticket was booked on the official U.S.-based website, paid by card and issued 10 hours ago; departure is in 10 days. Expected against saved policy: Do not guarantee a full fare refund merely because the paid booking is under 24 hours old. Explain the fare-rule boundary without needing a real booking lookup for this hypothetical question. Observed context: Attempt 2 asked for a reference or ticket number. Attempt 3’s core outcome matched but included unverified 15/16 May waiver rules; exact fees and fare terms were not tested.

Unpaid U.S. reservation: The JFK–Doha reservation was made through the official U.S.-based website 10 hours ago, departing in 10 days. No payment was made and no ticket issued. Can it be held unpaid for 24 hours? Expected against saved policy: Confirm this unpaid-hold option and its conditions, distinguish it from a paid-ticket refund, and do not request a ticket date for a reservation with no ticket. Observed context: Attempts 1 and 3 denied the hold; attempts 2 and 4 did not state the published 24-hour option; attempt 5 asked for a ticket date. All four substantive replies correctly said no fare can be refunded when none was paid.

Paid and ticketed 30 hours ago: The unused non-refundable U.S.-website JFK–Doha ticket was paid and issued 30 hours ago, departing in 10 days. Expected against saved policy: Explain that a full refund is not guaranteed, and separate any fare-specific refund from the unpaid-hold policy. Observed context: Attempts 1 and 4 requested a reference or ticket number. The seven substantive paid-ticket answers across A and C matched this core boundary; they are not ten complete correct answers.

LIMITATIONS

What this does not establish.

• Only the fixed unpaid question tested the hold. The 20 adaptive conversations all described paid, ticketed bookings.
• Two explicit hold denials and three incomplete/detail-request replies are different observations; zero of five stated the published hold.
• Paid-ticket fare rules are separate from the unpaid hold. No other airline’s free-cancellation rule is assumed.
• The 28-working-day replies may describe a different processing step from submission to the card issuer within seven business days; no refund was due or delayed in this test.
• Date-based waivers, disruption-only rules, exact fare charges and tax/refund amounts were not verified.
• The fourth refund-time example came from a replacement run after earlier results were reviewed; without it the timing count is three of three.
• One delivery was unconfirmed when a reCAPTCHA challenge appeared. No attempt to solve it is recorded; the run continued in new chats and a replacement was kept separate.
• The chat used global English while questions described U.S.-channel purchases. Some questions were compact notes imposed by the test’s length limit.
• Synthetic users, limited exchanges and new visible windows do not establish backend independence, root cause or customer failure rates.
• No reservation was made or held, no refund requested and no legal violation or improvement demonstrated.