Business Class Family Travel Hacks: How We Fly Cheap

There are so many different ways that you can fly these days. Personally, I prefer to make the flying a part of the journey, not just a means to get to a destination. So I look at flights like a hotel – it should be an experience and fun. With lie-flats, suites, showers, etc., we are really entering a new golden age of flying in my opinion if you can make it work. Here are a few of the tricks and tips that I’ve picked up along the way.

How to Find Cheap Business Class Tickets

• Flexible dates and non-peak times – If you have very specific dates, and those dates are over very busy travel times, most of the time you can’t get miles-based or reduced business class fares. However, if you can swing non-peak dates, you will do much better when it comes to flying in business class. This means things like leaving mid-week (Tuesday or Wednesday), and not traveling on holiday schedules.
• Positioning Flights – I’ve heard this referred to as positioning flights, but really what I’m talking about here is being flexible with where you take your long-haul flight to and from. Generally, I’m looking for a long-haul flight from continent to continent and NOT a specific city to city. For example, when flying to Europe most of the best deals are going to be from Toronto (YYZ), New York (EWR, JFK), and Washington DC (IAD); to Asia it will be from West Coast US airports. If you are looking at fares from Denver, Chicago, or Houston to these destinations they will normally be more expensive and less competitive than the East and West Coast cities.
• Separate tickets when needed – Again, if we think about using positioning flights most of the best mileage tickets are from major hubs to major hubs – for example from New York (JFK) to Frankfurt (FRA). That said, you should search mileage tickets that way as much as you can, and then be prepared to do a single hop economy flight. If you were going from Denver to Frankfurt, it might be more advantageous to fly from Denver to New York on a paid economy ticket and then from New York to Frankfurt on Miles. This does mean you typically will have to collect your bags and re-check them if you aren’t carrying-on, so be sure to factor that added time in during your planning.

• Generalized Searching – One thing for paid tickets is to search from various hubs to general destinations. The BEST way to do this is to use Google Flights (https://www.google.com/flights). Here you can select a departure like San Francisco (SFO) and then use “Asia” as the destination; this will open the map view and show you the rates to various cities across the globe. This helps you determine the best possible flights or to find a viable “positioning” flight that will get you your long-haul flight for much cheaper. For example, there may be good deals from San Francisco to Manila, and then you can take a short hop to Hong Kong.
• Roundtrip Mixed-Class Deals – Another trick for cheaper business class rates is to book round-trip tickets where the first leg is in business class and the second leg is in the lowest economy class possible, and then just cancel or not go on the return flight. I’ve done this on both Turkish and Aer Lingus – here is how it works. You will search for an economy ticket on the airline's website. They will show you both the economy and business class rates for each leg of your trip. Select the cheapest business class and the cheapest economy return – often times this rate will be cheaper than a one-way business class fare.
• Reverse Origin Tickets – I use this one a lot from Europe to the US because the deals are frankly better. The kicker here is that you normally need to have some reason to go back to Europe in the not too distant future. Here is how I will normally use this: I will book a one-way fare using miles from the US to Europe in the spring. I will then book a round-trip business class ticket from Europe to the US – this acts as the end of my spring trip and the beginning of my Fall trip. For example: I book a flight from Denver to Frankfurt for May 15th using miles, then I book a buy a round trip ticket from Stockholm to Denver via Istanbul on Turkish for May 30th returning September 15th. The tickets originating in Stockholm will be markedly cheaper than the other way around. You can see in the example below – the round-trip originating from Stockholm to Denver, and returning in the fall is round-trip vs if you originate in Denver.

Best Credit Card Points for Business Class Flights

There are hundreds of sites dedicated to credit card programs and miles. I will give you my basic strategy. I live in a United Hub – so, most of our flights out of our city are United flights – so I have a United Club card – and I direct all StarAlliance mileage into this account. This is my primary card for most of my purchases. However, with that – United has consistently lowered the valuation of their miles in recent years, so much so that I don’t really like using or redeeming United Miles as they are fairly pricey and I’m not getting as much value as I used to get. My secondary card is Amex Platinum – I love the Amex Platinum program because you can transfer points to so many partner airlines, and then from there you can transfer even more. For example – if you transfer points to British Airways – you can transfer those Avios to Qatar or Finnair. One note you should NEVER redeem points for flights directly through your credit card’s booking tool – you will normally only get 1 cent per mile this way. Typically I’m looking to get at least 2 – 2.5 cents per mile of value on my miles, anything more than that is just great.

Buying Miles vs. Earning Them

The other thing I do often that seems to confuse people is purchasing miles. I am constantly monitoring the deals on onemileatatime.com and checking deals on purchasing miles. If great deals come along – I will proactively buy miles to use later. Recently I bought 200,000 Finnair Miles (which can be transferred to British Airways) for 2100 euros – or about 1.2 cents per mile. I ended up buying 3 business class flights from Helsinki to Shanghai for 62,500 miles each – I transferred in 112,500 Amex points to get the remaining two flights using all miles. This effectively gets me business class for a 10.5 hour flight for 2100 euros + taxes.

• AirCanada Aeroplan – I want to call out this program specifically. I think this may be the best single program available right now for the fact that they have so many partner airlines (Emirates, Gulf Air, Cathay, etc..), redemption rates are relatively low, they often sell miles for a deep discount, and they are an Amex transfer partner. I can’t say enough good things about the Aeroplan program – I use this a lot.
• Avianca LifeMiles – Lifemiles is a great program as well in that they are almost ALWAYS selling cheap miles – however the availability of business class is far less than United or Aeroplan so I usually search and find the flight I’m looking for, ensure its available before I go and buy LifeMiles. They are also an Amex Transfer partner – but I would probably never transfer miles to this program because you can usually buy them for so cheap.
• British Airways – As I mentioned earlier BA with its Avios program has direct transfers to other programs like Qatar and Finnair – this gives you a great value as you can sometimes find award availability on one of the partner sites if not on BA directly. The other thing to do is check each partner site as sometimes a partner site will offer the same flight for less miles – so again a great program to transfer miles into.