- 2 months ago
Qatar Airways has earned a global reputation as one of the most admired names in aviation. Its rise to the top was not accidental, and it was not driven by marketing alone. The airline built its success through consistent service quality, premium passenger experiences, strategic global expansion, and a clear long-term vision. Over time, these strengths helped position Qatar Airways as the best airline in the world in the eyes of travelers, industry experts, and award organizations.
For many passengers, the phrase “best airline in the world” is not just about luxury cabins or gourmet meals. It also includes punctuality, network reach, safety, customer service, operational reliability, and the ability to handle disruptions professionally. Qatar Airways has managed to excel across these categories, which is one reason it is frequently mentioned alongside the world’s leading premium carriers. Its brand is now strongly associated with comfort, innovation, and excellence in international travel.
For many passengers, the phrase “best airline in the world” is not just about luxury cabins or gourmet meals. It also includes punctuality, network reach, safety, customer service, operational reliability, and the ability to handle disruptions professionally. Qatar Airways has managed to excel across these categories, which is one reason it is frequently mentioned alongside the world’s leading premium carriers. Its brand is now strongly associated with comfort, innovation, and excellence in international travel.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Qatar Airways started with one used plane that Iraq had once seized in a war. They had just
00:04$16,000 in profit their first year. Rival airlines refused to even work with them. Yet today,
00:09they are called the best airline in the world. But behind that success is a strategy that changed
00:14the airline industry. Let's break it down. The Little Airline Nobody Wanted to Work With
00:19Today, Qatar Airways is called the best airline in the world. It wins award after award. Passengers
00:25dream of flying with them. Business leaders line up to sit in their special seats, and they fly
00:29all over the earth, from Africa to America, from Europe to Asia. But here is a truth that will
00:33surprise you. This same airline that everyone praises today was once so small, and so weak that
00:37other airlines in the region did not even want to work with them. Yes, you heard that correctly.
00:41So how did they climb from that place at the very bottom to this place at the very top in
00:45just about
00:46three decades? That is the story we are telling today. And to understand just how far they climbed,
00:50we first have to go all the way back to 1993, when the world had never heard the name Qatar
00:55Airways at
00:56all. On November 22, 1993, Qatar Airways was officially born. The country of Qatar was small,
01:01very small. And most people around the world could not even find it on a map. But a group
01:05of private investors, together with a small stake from the government, sat down and made a big
01:09decision. They said we are going to build our very own airline. And to do it, they gathered about
01:13$7 million or 25 million Qatari riyals. Now in the airline business, that is not a lot of money.
01:19In fact, it is very very little. You cannot buy a single brand new plane with that amount. So they
01:24had to
01:24be smart. They went out to look for used aircraft to lease. Their very first plane was an Airbus A310
01:29that was leased secondhand from Kuwait Airways. And this plane had its own wild story. Before Qatar
01:34Airways got their hands on it, this plane had actually been seized by Iraq during the Gulf War.
01:38Just think about that. The very first plane Qatar Airways ever flew was a plane with a broken past.
01:43That was the level they were beginning from. On January 20, 1994, Qatar Airways ran its very first
01:49commercial flights. Not to London. Not to New York. Not to Paris. Their very first flights were short
01:54trips from Doha to Sharjah in Dubai. Their very first CEO was a man named Sheikh Hamid bin Ali bin
01:59Jabir al-Thani. He was a train pilot. He knew planes. But building a whole international airline from
02:04scratch, in a country nobody really understood yet, was going to test him in ways he could not have
02:09prepared for. Now here is where the story gets more interesting. When Qatar Airways was just getting
02:14started, they did what any smart new airline would do. They tried to shake hands with the other
02:17airlines in the region. They tried to be friends. Because that is how the airline business often
02:22works. Airlines share routes, share codes, share passengers. It benefits everybody. But when Qatar
02:27Airways went to their neighbors, especially the big new airline in Dubai called Emirates,
02:31they were not treated as a partner. They were treated as a threat. The other Gulf carriers looked
02:35at this new tiny airline and instead of welcoming them they pushed them away. They basically said,
02:39you are our competition. Go and figure it out by yourself. And that is exactly what Qatar Airways had to
02:44do. They had to go it alone. No help. No safety net. Nothing. But this small
02:47team did not fold up and go home. They kept adding new routes one by one. By the end of
02:521994,
02:52they were already flying to about 16 destinations. By the end of 1995, that number had climbed to 22
02:58cities. They flew to Amman, Cairo and Khartoum. They even stretched as far as London, Bombay,
03:03Colombo, Bangkok and Tokyo. In their first full year of operations, they had already carried around
03:08124,000 passengers. And the next year, that number crossed 200,000. They were growing, slowly,
03:14painfully, but surely. However, growth is not always the same thing as success.
03:18Under the surface, Qatar Airways was struggling badly. Their route strategy was all over the
03:22place. They were flying to weigh too many cities but only a few times a month for each city. It
03:26looked more like a chaotic charter service than a real international airline. They had to start
03:30cutting cities. Athens, Istanbul, Madras, Tunis, Calcutta and Muscat. They had to let all of these go.
03:36Business class and first class passengers were not showing up in the numbers they had hoped for.
03:40The margins were paper thin. In 1994, they only made a profit of about $16,000 for the entire year.
03:46$16,000 is not even the price of a decent used car in many countries. That was the total profit
03:52of a
03:52whole national airline. But that thin margin was not just a Qatar Airways problem. That is the reality
03:57of the entire airline industry. Even years later, the man who would go on to run Qatar Airways for
04:03decades would explain it plainly.
04:09So imagine what it was like at the very start when Qatar Airways was still trying to figure out
04:13what worked and what did not. And then came 1997. And 1997 changed everything. The government of
04:18Qatar stepped in in a much bigger way. They put fresh money into the airline. They increased
04:22their ownership stake. And most importantly, they brought in a new leader. A man whose name would
04:26eventually become known all over the aviation world. That man was Akbar Al Baker. He came in from
04:31Qatar's civil aviation department. And he had a very different vision. His idea was simple,
04:35but it was powerful. Instead of trying to be a cheap budget carrier flying to a lot of small
04:39cities with low-quality service, Qatar Airways would flip the whole thing upside down. They would
04:43become a premium airline. A luxury airline. An airline that people gladly paid more money for
04:48because the experience was worth every penny. He cut the roots by about one-third. He focused on
04:53quality over quantity. He started switching the fleet toward modern Airbus aircraft. And with that one
04:58decision, the old struggling Qatar Airways quietly died. And a completely new Qatar Airways was born.
05:04That was the exact moment the little airline that nobody wanted to work with became a rocket ship.
05:08But the biggest jump in their story was still to come. And when you hear what they did next,
05:12you will understand exactly why this airline went from being ignored to being feared.
05:17The insane rise that changed aviation forever. After the 1997 relaunch, Qatar Airways stopped playing
05:24small. They stopped acting like a scared little regional airline that was afraid of the big boys.
05:28Instead, they made a decision that many people at the time thought was crazy. They decided that
05:32they were not just going to compete with the biggest airlines in the world. They were going
05:35to try to beat them. And they were going to try to beat them at their own game, on their
05:39own most
05:39profitable routes, in front of their own passengers. Now let me tell you something. When you are a small
05:43airline from a small country and you say out loud that you are going to beat British Airways and
05:48Lufthansa and Emirates, people will laugh at you. They will call you a dreamer. They will call you crazy.
05:52But Qatar Airways was not laughing. They were building. The first big move they made was that
05:57they went hard on their fleet. Very hard. They started buying modern Boeing 777s and Airbus A330s.
06:03These are big long-range widebody planes. The kind of planes that can fly from Doha to almost anywhere
06:07in the world without needing to land in between. They understood something very important. In the
06:11airline business, if you fly old planes, passengers will not want to sit in them. Old planes are noisier.
06:17Old planes break down more often. Old planes burn more fuel. So Qatar Airways made it their
06:21mission to always fly some of the newest planes possible. And they got so good at this that by
06:25the middle of the 2010s, their whole fleet had an average age of under 5 years. Compare that with
06:30some of their competitors who were still flying planes that were 20 or 30 years old. It was a
06:34completely different level of operation. But new planes alone do not make an airline great. You
06:39also need somewhere for those planes to land and take off from. And this is where Qatar's location on
06:43the world map became its secret weapon. Qatar sits almost dead in the middle of the world. When you fly
06:48out
06:48of Doha you can reach most of the world's population within about 8 hours of flight time. Europe on one
06:52side, Africa on another side, India, China, Southeast Asia, even parts of Australia. So they built up
06:58their airport into a giant connecting hub. Passengers from London flying to Tokyo could stop in Doha to
07:03change planes. Passengers from Nairobi flying to Lowe's Angels could stop in Doha to change planes.
07:09This is what the industry calls the hub and spoke model. And Qatar Airways used geography to make it
07:14work better than almost anyone else on the planet. Then in 2013, Qatar Airways made another huge move.
07:19They officially joined the One World Alliance. This meant that suddenly, their passengers could
07:23book tickets that connected smoothly with British Airways, American Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Japan
07:27Airlines, Kantas and many other big names. Overnight their global reach exploded. And then in 2014,
07:32they opened the brand new Hamid International Airport in Doha. This was not just any airport,
07:37this was a masterpiece. It was designed for very fast connections, sometimes as short as 45 to 60
07:43minutes between flights. It had parallel runways. It had luxury shopping. It had lounges that felt
07:48like five-star hotels. And Skytrax, the aviation rating body that everyone in the industry watches,
07:53gave it multiple awards including world's best airport in some years. And then in 2017,
07:58Qatar Airways dropped a bomb on the entire airline industry. They introduced the Q-suit.
08:02Now if you have never flown in a Q-suit before, let me try to paint the picture for you.
08:06Imagine walking into a plane and instead of a normal business class seat, you get your very own
08:10private room in the sky, with sliding doors, that you can actually close, so nobody in the cabin can
08:15see you. You have a bed that lies completely flat. If you are traveling with someone you love,
08:19you can share a double bed together. If you are traveling with a group of four business partners,
08:23you can combine four suites into one big shared space where you can all eat and hold meetings
08:27together. This is on an airplane, cruising at 40,000 feet above the ground. Nobody had ever done this
08:32before. Not Emirates, not Singapore Airlines, not British Airways, nobody. Qatar Airways had gone from being the
08:38one copying others to being the one everyone else was copying. Suddenly, the whole industry had to
08:43rush to try and match what Qatar Airways had built. And Q-suit went on to win Skytrax's world's best
08:48business class award again and again. But just as Qatar Airways was reaching this new peak, a disaster
08:53hit them. And it was not a plane crash, it was politics. On June 5, 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United
08:59Arab
08:59Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt suddenly cut all ties with Qatar. They accused Qatar of supporting terrorism,
09:04which Qatar strongly denied. And they did something brutal. They closed their airspace to all Qatar Airways
09:09aircraft. They closed their airports to all Qatar Airways passengers. Overnight, Qatar Airways lost access to
09:1518 destinations in the blockading countries. That was about 17.5% of their weekly seat capacity gone in a
09:22single day. Their passenger numbers dropped from 32 million to about 29.2 million. It was a massive body blow.
09:28But it got worse. Their planes now had to fly the long way around all those closed airspaces. So a
09:33flight from
09:33Doha to Djibouti, which used to be short, now took over an hour longer. Every single flight was burning
09:38more fuel than it needed to. Every single flight was costing more money than it should have. The
09:42financial reports were painful to look at. For the financial year 2017-2018, Qatar Airways posted a
09:47net loss of about 69 million dollars. And that came right after the year before, when they had made a
09:52profit of over 2.7 billion Qatari Riyals. The following year was even more painful. For the financial year
09:582018-2019, the net loss ballooned to over 2.3 billion Qatari Riyals. Any normal airline would
10:04have collapsed under that kind of pressure. But Qatar Airways refused to be dragged into the
10:09politics of it all. Their CEO stood firm on one simple idea about who this airline really flies for.
10:15We are not a political institution. We are an industry that serves the common people.
10:22And that mindset shaped how they responded. Instead of shrinking under the pressure,
10:26they expanded. They launched 24 brand new routes across Europe, Asia, and Africa to replace the
10:30routes they had just lost. They rerouted their planes through Iran and Turkey. They pushed even
10:34harder into their cargo business. And by early 2021, when the Alula Agreement finally ended the blockade,
10:40Qatar Airways came out of that fire not weaker but stronger.
10:43In fact, reopening the airspace was expected to save them around $1.2 billion every single year
10:49going forward. And by the time the dust settled, Qatar Airways had done something almost no other
10:54airline in the world had ever managed to do. They had won the Skytrax World's Best Airline Award
10:58nine different times, in the years 2011, 2012, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2024, and again in 2025,
11:08nine times. Nobody had ever dominated the aviation awards quite like this before.
11:13But being called the best airline in the world comes with a very heavy price tag. And that price
11:18is what we are going to talk about in the final part of this story.
11:22Being the best in the world, but at what cost?
11:24When you become the best in your industry, everyone starts watching you. Every single
11:28decision you make gets pulled apart and analyzed. Every single mistake you make becomes headline news
11:33around the world. And Qatar Airways, by climbing to the top of the aviation ladder,
11:37also became the airline with the biggest target painted on its back.
11:40And in this final part of the story, you are going to see both the incredible strength of
11:44Qatar Airways today, and also the shadows and scandals that follow it wherever it flies.
11:49Because the truth is, no matter how many awards you win, you cannot outrun your own problems forever.
11:54Let us start with the good news first. Today, Qatar Airways is bigger than it has ever been
11:58in its entire history. They now operate a fleet of more than 250 aircraft flying to over 160
12:03destinations across six continents. In their strong years, they carry more than 40 million passengers a year.
12:09Their yearly revenue has crossed 22 billion dollars, and their profits are still counted in the
12:13billions. That is a very long way from that tiny 16,000 dollar profit they made in the whole year
12:18of 1994. And they are not slowing down. In 2025 alone, Qatar Airways placed one of the biggest
12:24aircraft orders in the history of Boeing, ordering up to 210 widebody aircraft, including new 787
12:29Dreamliners, and the upcoming 777X that single deal alone was worth many billions of dollars.
12:35And they did not stop there. Qatar Airways became the first airline in the world to roll out Starlink
12:40high-speed satellite Wi-Fi across a large widebody fleet, giving passengers internet speeds of up to
12:45500 megabits per second while flying in the sky. That means you can literally stream Netflix,
12:50join a Zoom call, or upload huge files while you are cruising at 40,000 feet in the air.
12:54It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, but this is now real. And through it all,
12:58they have kept a very warm relationship with their aircraft makers, including Boeing.
13:02In a recent interview, the CEO was asked about all the trouble Boeing had been going through
13:07with their planes, and listened to how he responded.
13:09You're confident Boeing makes safe planes?
13:13110%.
13:13That kind of confident public backing of a partner is exactly why Qatar Airways has been
13:18able to stay at the top for so long. They stand by their partners, they stand by their vision,
13:23and they stand by their brand. Not every decision they have made along the way has been a perfect one.
13:27In fact, one of their most famous decisions has now been openly admitted as a mistake by the
13:31airline itself. That decision was the purchase of the Airbus A380 Superjumbo, which Qatar originally
13:36ordered back in 2001, becoming the ninth customer for the huge aircraft. For years, the A380 was
13:42seen as the future of flying. A double-decker plane with room for over 500 people. Big, bold,
13:47beautiful. But over time, as fuel prices climbed higher and higher, the plane became more and more
13:52expensive to fly. And in an honest interview, the CEO himself said the truth out loud.
13:57In my opinion, looking backward, it was the biggest mistake we did, to purchase A380s.
14:04That is a very rare thing to hear from the head of any major airline, public admission,
14:08on camera, that a multi-billion dollar decision was in fact a wrong decision. And he did not stop
14:13there. He kept going and explained why.
14:15It was good when it had launched in 2002.
14:20He explained that even though the plane was fine when it first came out, the world of aviation
14:24had shifted underneath it. And that shift caught them out.
14:27But unfortunately, with the rising fuel price and the mistake in the design,
14:36we think it was a big mistake.
14:39Even with mistakes like that one, Qatar Airways has kept climbing. But there are darker chapters in
14:44this story that we cannot skip over. And this is where the shine of all those awards starts to
14:49fade a little. On October 2, 2020, something happened at Hamid International Airport that
14:54shocked the entire world. A newborn baby was found abandoned in a bathroom bin at the airport.
14:58In response to that, airport authorities did something that has since become one of the
15:02biggest scandals in modern aviation. They pulled female passengers off at least 10 flights,
15:06including a Qatar Airways flight bound for Sydney, Australia. These women were taken by armed
15:11guards into waiting ambulances on the tarmac. And there, without their proper consent,
15:15they were subjected to invasive medical examinations to check whether they had
15:18recently given birth. Thirteen Australian women were among those affected on just one of those
15:22flights. Many of them later described the experience as feeling like an assault.
15:26Some spoke of deep trauma, of depression, of nightmares that would not go away.
15:30The whole world reacted with anger. Australia lodged a formal diplomatic complaint.
15:34The United Kingdom joined in. Qatar's government eventually expressed regret,
15:38launched an official investigation, and even prosecuted an airport official who received
15:42a suspended sentence. Five of the Australian women went on to sue Qatar Airways along with the
15:47Civil Aviation Authority and the airport operator. And in 2024, an Australian court dismissed the claims
15:53against Qatar Airways under the Montreal Convention, although the case against the airport operator was
15:58allowed to move forward. Qatar Airways technically won the legal battle, but the damage to their
16:02reputation was already done, especially in western markets where the story was told and retold over and
16:08over again. And this was not the only controversy the airline has had to sit through. Reports also emerged of
16:13the
16:13airline, monitoring its own pilots on private online forums. Reuters reported that Qatar Airways had sued
16:18anonymous pilots who were criticizing the airline in private chat groups. Then in 2023, a popular flight
16:24reviewing YouTuber named Josh Cahill posted a critical review of a Qatar Airways economy flight. According to the
16:30reports, the airline allegedly offered him a bribe to remove it, then reportedly fired the entire flight crew that had
16:36served him and finally banned him from ever flying with them again. It was a public relations mess.
16:41The longtime CEO Akbar Al Baker, when he was asked about Qatar's public image around the world, has always pointed
16:47at the media
16:48as part of the problem. And this quiet belief has carried the airline through more storms. During the pandemic, when
17:06everyone
17:06else was scared, Qatar Airways kept flying. When the FIFA World Cup came to Qatar in late 2022, they used
17:12it as a moment to show the world
17:13exactly what their small country could offer. Al Baker had already predicted that around 1.5 million
17:19football fans would come. Now in 2026, Qatar Airways has taken another huge step forward. They became the
17:31official airline partner of the 2026 FIFA World Cup co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico. They
17:37increased their flight frequencies to major US host cities like Boston, Lowe's Angels, San Francisco and Miami. They
17:43dressed up a special Boeing 777 in a full FIFA-themed livery. They rolled out complete travel packages for
17:49fans. It was another huge moment of global visibility. Another fresh chance to remind the world exactly who
17:55they are. From a tiny airline in 1993 with one leased second-hand aircraft and $16,000 in yearly profit,
18:02to a
18:02global giant now flying to over 160 cities, with over 250 modern planes, tens of billions of dollars in
18:08revenue, nine world's best airline awards, and a name that everyone in aviation now respects. Qatar Airways
18:14did not just build an airline, they built a legend. And whether you love them for their Q-suit or
18:18you
18:18disagree with the controversies that follow them, one thing is very clear. They changed the entire aviation
18:24industry. And the world of flying will never be the same again. Loved this video? Click on this card for
18:29more.