For many, travelling in business class or, better still, first class is an unattainable dream. However, if you do your homework well, you can greatly reduce the price of your ticket and find one that’s more affordable, and sometimes not even that much more expensive than an economy ticket.
It’s a post you’ve been asking for for a long time, and one that’s taken us a long time to write, but here it is at last (in any case, this year, for various reasons, we’re having a lot of trouble getting in-depth articles out within a normal timeframe, but it’s going to get better). In fact, as we write about our travels and explain the price structure of our flights, we get a lot of comments along the lines of “ah that’s a really attractive price, but how did you manage to find it?”
So here are the techniques we use, and you’ll see – even if you’re disappointed – that there’s no magic method or closely guarded secret that will enable you to travel in the most luxurious classes for practically nothing. It’s all about empiricism, trial and error and intuition (what some would call experience). But at least the advantage is that it’s accessible to everyone with a little practice, provided you have the time and accept the rules of the game.
Here we go…
Why focus only on business and first classes?
It’s almost certain that many people would also like us to deal with economy class tickets, but we won’t go into that, although the methods remain the same. It’s true that a cheap business class ticket is objectively expensive, but…
First of all, we prefer to talk about what we know best, and there may be practices and subtleties specific to economy class that we don’t understand because we don’t fly it much. Secondly, and the statistics and comments prove it, you’re only interested in “forward class”. 99% of people will only ever travel in economy, but what interests you and makes you dream is what we call “ front class ”. Last but not least, the method that works best for us is only profitable for originally expensive tickets, whereas for economy it’s not always worth it.
The price of the ticket is inversely proportional to your flexibility
The first and perhaps only thing you need to know if you’re on the hunt for a cheap business class ticket is that you’ll need to be flexible in order to benefit from the lowest fares. If you’re adamant about your dates, your destination, the airline you want to fly with or even your departure city, don’t dream: you won’t find anything really interesting.
On the other hand, if you’re flexible on one or more of these factors, you can find some really great rates.
It also goes without saying that the earlier you book, the more likely you are to find a good fare. But this is not an absolute rule: if the rules of yield management mean that the earlier you book, the less you pay, then our favorite techniques can also be used to find last-minute or near-last-minute deals when airlines have softened load factors at a given airport.
When people ask me how I managed to find such and such a fare, I often say that it wasn’t me who found the fare, but the fare that found me. I was looking for something without any preconceived ideas, I played around with a few variables, and in the end I ended up with a destination that wasn’t the one I was looking for at first, but the proposed price convinced me. But we’ll explain below.
What is a cheap ticket?
Before going any further, it’s important to be clear about your expectations and what you can expect to get. When we talk about cheap tickets, we’re not talking about the special offers that airlines offer on a fairly regular basis. Saving 200 or 300 euros on a normal ticket is not enough for us. In fact, to the best of my recollection, I’ve only used this technique twice: once over 15 years ago for Air France’s traditional summer promotions, and once with Olivier to go to China, but in combination with another…
So at what price do we find it “interesting”?
First and foremost, it’s important to bear in mind that we won’t be seeing pre-COVID fares again for a very long time. Back then, for example, you could easily find business class tickets to Australia on Singapore Airlines for 2,000 euros. I might as well tell you that’s over, and it’s not about to come back. Some will say it’s because of ever-increasing taxes, others that it’s because of the price of fuel, but it’s not: if ticket prices remain high, it’s simply because there aren’t enough planes to meet demand, at least today.
As a result, we’re having to scale back our ambitions in terms of low prices. Of course, it all depends on the season, and we don’t pretend to teach you that off-season travel is cheaper than in the height of the tourist season. It also depends on the destination, even for a given country: demand for New York, for example, is always higher than for other cities in the country, so it’s a priori more expensive, even if this is tempered by strong competition.
All this fluctuates a lot, but let’s just say that it becomes interesting at €200 or less for a flight between Europe and the USA, €2500 for Asia and €3000 for Oceania. But this should be taken with a grain of salt, as it all fluctuates according to season and airline marketing strategies.
For example, at the time of writing you can find Lisbon-Cancun at 1100 euros for November, Copenhagen-Toronto or New York at 1300 euros for early 2025, or even Budapest-Hong Kong on Air France at 1700 euros for this summer.
It’s just a rough idea, but it gives you an idea.
More pragmatically, I look for a ticket departing from Paris without trying to optimize anything, I note the price and then after optimization I look at the percentage reduction I manage to obtain, which allows me to determine whether it’s worthwhile or not.
Specialized forums
Many of you have told us that you use forums to find the best deals, and it’s true that it’s a very practical way… when you don’t know how to search for yourself. There are plenty of forums dedicated to the subject, but our favorite is Flyertalk, which is quite specialized, with real connoisseurs, and infinitely better than most French forums with good deals that aren’t deals at all, and a lot of amateurism.
But there’s one thing to bear in mind.
The first is that when a very attractive fare exists, it is sometimes limited to a certain number of seats. So when a fare is published on a forum, it may well be that, if it’s for a popular destination, it won’t be available for long. But it can also happen that the availability is quite strong and long-lasting, especially when it’s a market fare, which is not a special offer but a deliberate commercial strategy by a airline to “suck in” customers departing from a given airport.
On the other hand, when a fare is too attractive, you need to be wary, and in general we don’t recommend jumping at the chance. For example, a business class ticket between Paris and Singapore for 300€ is not right. In fact, it’s an error Fare or mistake fare. Sometimes it’s a typing error when entering the fare, or a currency error… But it’s very common for airlines to realize that they’ve made a mistake and decide not to honor the fare, either refunding you or downgrading you to economy. If a few customers take advantage of this, they can turn a blind eye, but if it’s dozens or hundreds, you can be sure that the ticket will be cancelled. So as soon as such a fare is made public on a forum, there’s a good chance that it won’t be honored by the airline.
Airline special offers
Some of you have told us in comments that your favorite way to find good deals is to subscribe to their favorite airline’s special offers. It’s a good start, but it’s not enough.
Firstly, because it limits you to one airline (but there’s nothing to stop you subscribing to several), but above all, it requires you to depart from Paris in general. And there’s one thing you need to bear in mind: Paris is an expensive city, not just as a destination, but also as a departure point, whatever the airline (and especially with Air France).
The reason? Air France simply because, by definition, it offers direct flights, which are by definition more expensive than flights with connections offered by airlines that pick you up in Paris and take you back to their hubs. But apart from the occasional Lufthansa, which has a fairly aggressive policy of “stealing” customers from Air France, flights from Paris are generally among the most expensive in Europe. Just a question of commercial policy.
There was a time, but it’s less obvious now, when Air France had very good prices from Brussels (Bruxelles midi station with train to Roissy, the station having an airport code: ZYR). At the time, I was more interested in the Air France Belgique newsletter than the parent company’s newsletter for Paris.
And business class special offer policies are changing. Air France used to run very attractive offers in the summer, because regular business class users travelled in economy with their families on vacation, and planes had to be filled. This was less the case for other airlines, as Germans and British passengers, to name but two, were more likely to travel in business class, even for leisure. But times have changed, and Air France has realized that on certain destinations 60% of the business cabin is occupied by leisure travellers. As a result, if airlines adapt their fare policies for these travelers, whose flights are not paid for by their business, they break prices less than in the past, because these customers come on their own.
So the winning strategy that works almost every time is to change your departure city.
Changing departure cities
There’s one thing to bear in mind. The price of a ticket is not a function of distance, but of two things: demand (yield management) and the commercial policy of the airline departing from a given country or airport. So, on a one-off or regular basis, you may find far lower fares than “normal” from a given airport with a given airline.
When we talk about changing departure city, we’re not talking about trying to leave the provinces, but about changing country. In fact, as you can see from the examples I gave, there were no departures from Paris. I’m not saying that there aren’t any good deals from Paris, but they’re pretty rare compared to other cities where they’re almost systematic. You may have noticed in our travel reviews that we very often make a detour via Scandinavia, and that’s already a clue…
I was talking about empirical methods and flexibility, and here’s a very good example. Here’s how I do it.
1°) I have an idea of where I want to go
In this case, of course, I start by searching from Paris, note the price, then change the departure airport and see what happens. Google Flight is very handy for this, as all you have to do is change the departure airport on the results page, and the page changes automatically. Another trick that Google Flights also makes very easy is to change the travel dates, because sometimes you can save 500 or 1000 euros by just 2 days or by extending your stay a little! I’ll soon be putting together a practical guide to using Google Flights for beginners.
Laborious? Not really, because you’ll eventually know where to look. Each airline has its own commercial policy in terms of market Fares, and favors certain geographic zones that they want to conquer, but there are certain constants.
Lufhansa, for example, has decided to wage war on Air France on departures from Paris, offering fares that are often aggressive and often the only attractive airline departing from our capital. But until its new Allegris cabin is widely deployed, it offers a really poor business class product. In contrast, Air France is often very attractive from Germany’s secondary airports. Ironically, it’s often more attractive for a Frenchman to fly Lufthansa and for a German to fly Air France.
Regardless of the airline, Scandinavia is a “good deal” zone. Any examples?
– Oslo-Saigon on Turkish Airlines at 1700 euros. I ended up paying 2200 because I took travel classes that carried more miles to maintain my status, but depending on the dates, the lowest fares were between 1500 and 1700.
– Gothenburg-Kuala Lumpur on Singapore Airlines at 3200 euros. In fact, it was Gothenburg-Copenhagen-Singapore-Kuala Lumpur. This may sound expensive, but it was the era of travel revenge at the end of the COVID, and even more so before the Christmas holidays, when everyone was traveling and fares were sky-high. Departing from Paris, I couldn’t get anything under 7,000 euros.
– Stockholm-Sydney at 3700 euros. Again, at the end of COVID, when prices were skyrocketing. It’s a lot of money, but on a price per kilometer basis, it’s a lot less than the train, and for a 24-hour trip in business class, it’s well worth it. Again, nothing from Paris for less than 7,000 euros.
– Gothenburg-Sydney at 3400 on ANA..actually a Gothenburg-Munich-Tokyo-Sydney. 0.19 cents per kilometer. I managed to lower the price by 500 euros by adding two nights to my initial pan. Before the COVID, flights from Gothenburg, Stockholm or Copenhagen on Singapore Airlines to Sydney were available almost all the time at 2,000 or even 1,900 euros. But that was before. In any case, at that time (December, so summer there), I had flights at 6 or 7,000 euros from Paris, 6,000 from Madrid or Munich and 4,500 from Brussels. And not on airlines of the same standing.
– Gothenburg-Phuket on Turkish Airlines at 2000 euros at the height of the winter/spring tourist season. I should point out that friends of mine flying to the same destination from Paris at the same time paid 1,300 euros in economy on Air France.
– This summer I found a Gothenburg-Singapore flight on Air France at 2,000 euros instead of 3,500 from Paris. The same fare was available from Stockholm or Oslo, but not Copenhagen. And I didn’t even book a month in advance.
Here you can clearly see that Finnair is quite aggressive commercially speaking, while the other airlines are fairly aligned.
And here you can see that on departure from Gothenburg it’s Air France that’s aggressive, with a price that’s quite incredible for a destination that’s reputed to be expensive. And you can see that in general, whatever the airline, Gothenburg is much less expensive as a departure city than Paris.
It’s still a mystery to us why Scandinavia is such a hotbed of bargains. It’s a clientele with high purchasing power that is less sensitive to the price factor, for example, than French customers. But, as has been proven for many years, when you’re looking for a good price, that’s usually where you’ll find it most easily.
10 days ago there was a Stockholm-Buenos Aires at 1500 on Turkish Airlines.
Otherwise, in the past we had found a first-class flight on Lufthansa to Beijing at 1700 euros. Here we had mixed a
special offer and a market fare. Lufthansa offered first-class “companion fares” at very low prices. The principle is simple: very low fares on condition that you buy two tickets, a kind of couple fare but which fortunately works without being a couple, you just need to be two. So we bought two tickets for 3400 euros (1700 each) departing from a city involved in the
promotion, Manchester in this case.
Then, depending on the time of year and the airline, you can sometimes search from Italy, Spain or eastern countries like Hungary. The UK also works from time to time. As I was saying, it’s not an exact science, so you trial and error, changing cities and dates, and eventually you start to have a short list of airports to try out first.
2°) I’m open-minded about the destination
In this case, I proceed as described above, but with a variation. Once I’ve found a good fare for a destination departing from a city, I look at what the airline in question or others are offering for other destinations. Here again, it’s easy with Google flights: you can choose to look at just one airline and then just change the arrival airport, or you can keep the all-airline option and just change the airport.
Sometimes it doesn’t work out, but sometimes it does. What is the logic behind this?
– Turkish Airlines, for example, which offers a very attractive fare between Oslo and Hanoi, can do so for two reasons. Either it needs to sell flights to Hanoi and has difficulty filling them, or it wants to pre-empt part of the traffic from Oslo, in which case it can offer attractive fares to other destinations.
– One airline may decide to be aggressive from a departure city, and others fall in line.
In all the examples I’ve given here, you have a mix of positive factors: flights with connections from cities where an airline has decided to adopt an aggressive commercial policy, either occasionally or on a regular basis.
You can also see why our technique works especially well for first or business class. Paying less from Sweden, for example, is interesting, but if the cost of the flight to get there – or even the hotel, if you want to give yourself a safety margin and avoid one of the risks of self connect – is higher than the savings, it’s not worth it.
With an economy ticket, you’ll save 200 or 300 euros… it’s not worth it, unless you think that for the same price you might be able to visit one more city.
With a business class ticket, when you save between 1,500 and 3,000 euros, it’s well worth it. You can maximize your savings by taking the cheapest possible flight to get there, with a safety margin to ensure you don’t have to worry about a delayed flight, or reinvest some of your savings to arrive the day before or stay after your return flight and take advantage of the opportunity to visit the city and discover the local gastronomy.
Bottom line
There are plenty of more or less effective and eccentric ways of finding affordable business or first class tickets on the web. The airlines’ promotions are interesting, but especially outside their hubs. Booking on certain days at certain times or clearing your browser’s cache are grandmotherly remedies of questionable effectiveness, to say the least. Playing on the departure city, on the other hand, works almost every time, as long as you’re flexible about the departure city, the destination, the dates or all three.
It may sound like a do-it-yourself approach, requiring a bit of time, elbow grease and experience, but it works. At least for us, it’s proven its worth.
But if there were a way to halve the price of a ticket every time, without the slightest effort, the airlines would have already put an end to it.
Image : cheap ticket by Rawpixel.com via shutterstock
