Business class has a before and an after, and the dividing line is Qsuite. At the
2024 Travelling for Business Awards, the cabin's creator,
Qatar Airways, was crowned Winner of Best Business Class Airline of the Year, extending a run of premium dominance that has few parallels in modern aviation.
Launched in 2017, Qsuite gave business class what first class had hoarded: a door. Behind it, a fully flat bed, dine-on-demand service and a configurable layout whose centre suites convert into double beds or a four-person meeting space for colleagues travelling together, an industry first that remains, years on, an industry rarity. The 2024 awards period brought fresh external validation, with Skytrax once again naming the airline's product the World's Best Business Class, and Qatar Airways answering the acclaim not with complacency but with development work on the suite's next generation.
For UK companies, the cabin arrives attached to serious utility. Services from London and key regional airports feed Hamad International Airport in Doha, whose vast Al Mourjan business lounges rank among the finest premium spaces anywhere, before onward connections across Asia, Africa, Australasia and the Middle East. As the sole Gulf member of the oneworld alliance, the airline lets British travellers earn and spend Avios and carry status across a familiar partner network, easing its adoption into corporate programmes built around the UK flag carrier.
The 2024 shortlist, British Airways Business Class, JetBlue Mint, Singapore Airlines and Virgin Atlantic Upper Class, gathered the sharpest premium products flying, and the judges' choice of Qatar Airways was a statement about completeness: seat, service, lounge, network and loyalty, each at or near the top of its class, all at once.
Qatar Airways' consistency owes much to control of its own ecosystem. The airline effectively curates the journey end to end, cabin, crew, hub, lounges, even the transfer experience in Doha, which lets it guarantee standards multi-partner itineraries cannot. Premium travellers connecting through Hamad International move between aircraft, spa, sleep pods and dining without leaving the airline's design language, arriving at the final destination with the journey counted as rest rather than cost.
The
Travelling for Business Awards celebrate the products that reset expectations, and in 2024 Qatar Airways once again occupied the category it created, leaving the chasing pack a familiar, formidable target.
