5 Tips To Show You That Business Class Can Be Affordable
When it comes to flying in Business Class most people say without hesitating that they can’t afford the ticket, and that it is only for the rich people.
But is that true? Is Business Class really unaffordable?
We will show you 5 tips how to get affordable Business Class Tickets.
We will explain and show you that a business class ticket can be affordable. You don’t have to invest a ton of money to fly in business class. We will tell you as well why business class is worth it, even if it costs more than economy class.
But there are a few things you have to watch out for, we will show you with 5 tips.
1. Some routes are often cheap in business class
There are some flight routes on which you may often find cheap business class tickets, even for transatlantic flights. We will provide you with two examples to show you that Business Class doesn’t have to be expensive.
London to Vienna with British Airways.
In this example it would cost you £178 in Business Class Round Trip. You would earn 80Tier Points and a bit less than 2,500 Avios, with your British Airways Executive Club card.
The next time you make a booking you can use your Avios to make the price drop. On short haul flights, you will safe £10 when using 1,000 Avios and £20 when using 2,800 Avios.
If you booked the same flight in economy class, it would cost you £70 for the Round Trip. You would only earn 10 Tier Points and roughly around 500 Avios.
In economy class you have to pay extra for your baggage. Adding 1 bag to the booking would increase the ticket to £98 already. In business class 2 bags are included.
Choosing your seats will cost money as well, in business class from £16 up to £20 and in economy class £12 up to £36. Of course, you don’t have to choose a seat in advance, but only in Business Class you will be sure to have no one sitting next to you, as the middle seats are blocked.
Let’s do the math:
Economy Class with 1 bag: Will cost you £98 and you can’t be sure to have no one sitting next to you.
Business class with 2 bags: Will cost you £178, that’s a difference of £80 (plus £10 off your next flight redeeming 1,000 Avios or even £20 off redeeming 2,800 Avios).
You will have no one sitting next to you and you will earn 80 TP for your status tier.
On top of that you will have lounge access in London and in Vienna. Food and drinks aren’t cheap at the airport, and in the lounge you can eat and drink for free.
Let’s not forget you will also get something to eat and drink for free during your flight.
At the airport you will have your dedicated business class counter and you are among the first who may enter and leave the aircraft, which could possibly save you some time if you have to clear immigration.
London to New York with TAP
A business class Round Trip would cost you £990. If you credit the miles to SAS you will even earn 150%-200% in miles.
Seat selection is for free, and meanwhile TAP has excellent lie flat seats on all their long haul airplanes.
You may check in 2 bags for free and you again would have lounge access and a dedicated business class counter at the airport.
£330 is the cost for the same flight in economy class. That is a lot cheaper than in business class, but you will get so much less than in business class.
If you travel for example as a couple, you will have to add the price for at least 1 bag. You most probably want to sit next to each other, which will increase the price to over £400, without all the comfort you would get in business class like lounge access, a lie flat seat etc.
There are of course more routes that usually are cheap in business class.
2. Airlines regularly offer Business Class sales
With regularly we don’t mean that on a certain date airlines publish a sale, such as a summer or a winter sale.
Many people ask, when are business class sales? The answer is that different airlines offer sales on different routes through the whole year.
These are actually the fares we are posting here on Premium-Flights. We check on a daily basis to find those fares, and we post them here for you.
The “sale” fares have an expiration date. This date can be found in our posts under Fare Rules — Sales restrictions. Sometimes this expiration date will be extended when an airline wants to sell a few more tickets :).
Sometimes airlines offer as well flash sales. These sales are often available for 24hours only, or even less, and ticket prices are extra low.
Subscribe to our newsletter or and you will be sent an email or push notification to benefit from these prices.
3. Book in advance
With most airlines you can book flight tickets up to 1 year in advance. If you plan to visit let’s say Los Angeles next year, you should already start looking for cheap fares now.
It might be possible that an airline starts a sale right now, by selling cheap tickets to LA from your home airport with the exact date you are looking for.
If that’s the case we suggest not to wait. We’ve made that experience already by ourselves. We saw a good price, but we thought that the fare would surely come back over the next months, but it didn’t. At the end we paid much more than necessary.
4. Be flexible
Business and first class fares vary significantly depending on the date you travel and on which country or city the itinerary originates.
Sometimes it is enough to change the date by one single day. Instead of departing on a Friday you could depart on a Saturday and the ticket becomes 500€ less expensive.
A ticket may as well become much cheaper if you choose the right airport to depart from.
Let’s say you live about 50km from your home airport. It might be possible that you will find a business class ticket from an airport that is around 250km away for half the price. That sounds like a lot of money, but this really occurs very often.
In such a case it would perfectly make sense to take the 2-hour drive in your car. You could as well buy a cheap economy class ticket to that airport.
Sometimes it can even make sense to depart from another country.
You can use our search function to find your desired destination and it will show you all fares available from different airports.
5. Upgrade or book your flight with miles
Finally, you should always collect miles for every single flight or credit card purchase you make. If you know how to play the points and miles game you can get cheap business or even first class tickets as well. However, this takes time. You can’t say you want to fly next year to Hawaii in business class when you haven’t started collecting miles or points yet.
Read our tutorials, all about AVIOS, all about MILES AND MORE, to get started with the points and miles game.
Originally published at https://www.premium-flights.com on July 11, 2020.
