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British Airways has announced that customers traveling out of Amsterdam can have “the experience of premium travel at very attractive rates” when flying to the Far East. By this the airline means that, for a limited period of time, they’re selling discount Business Class (Club World) seats for travel from Amsterdam to a number of countries in Asia and, surprisingly considering neither is in the Far East, Dubai and Sydney.
The full list of destinations that British Airways has provided is as follows:
- Bangkok
- Beijing
- Chengdu
- Dubai
- Hong Kong
- Singapore
- Shanghai
- Sydney
Before I go any further I’m going to have to spoil a few people’s mornings right now because, either I’m missing something (possible), or British Airways and I have a very different definition of “attractive rates”.
The Basics:
- Seats book into Club World booking class “I”
- Tickets must be purchased before 1 March 2016
- Travel must take place between 20 March and 4 September 2016
The Fares
First the bad news. For the following destinations these are the best round-trip Business Class fares I could find out of Amsterdam…..and I don’t consider any of them that “attractive”:
- Sydney – $4,080/£2,920/€3,697
- Hong Kong – $2,216/£1,586/€2,007
- Beijing – $2,306/£1,650/€2,090 (there are some slightly lower fares but with very long connections)
- Chengdu – $2,249/£1,610/€2,038 (there are some slightly lower fares but with very long connections)
- Singapore – $2,948/£2,110/€2,670
- Shanghai – $2,291/£1,640/€2,076
In the past few months we’ve seen fares of under $2,000/£1,430/€1,810 to all of those destinations on other OneWorld airlines (some fares were considerably below $2,000) so none of these makes me want to jump for joy and thank the overlords at Waterside for their generosity 🙂
There are, however, a couple of ok deals to the two remaining destinations:
Dubai
I’d only classify this a s a”reasonable” deal.
The best round-trip Business Class fare I found to Dubai was $1,858/£1,330/€1,683. And there’s a lot of availability at that price point:
Here’s April (Easter holidays):
And here’s July (for those immune to the heat):
Be careful when searching for these fares because there are a lot of routings that leave you with horribly long lay-overs and there are a few that have you changing airports between Heathrow and Gatwick. You can avoid all of that if you’re careful:
Bangkok
In my opinion this is the best deal of the lot.
The best round-trip Business Class fare I found to Bangkok was $1,813/£1,298/€1,633. And, just like for the Dubai fare, there’s a lot of availability at that price point:
Here’s April (Easter holidays):
Here’s June:
And here’s August:
The other months in the travel period look much the same.
When searching for these flights you have to be extra careful and, because of that, I’ve done the work for you.
If you were to perform the search, as I did, using the ITA Matrix Search, you’d get a lot of options all pricing out at $1,813/£1,298/€1,633. The problem is that a lot of them involve airport changes that you shouldn’t have to do and a lot involve unacceptably long travel times.
So, for those who like to have things easy, this is the best set of flight times to look for – I’ve filtered the results for you:
And here is that set of flights priced up on BA.com:
For those of you who like to do the searches yourselves, these are the parameters I used in the ITA Matrix Search to rule out undesirable flights:
Note that I set the maximum duration of the outbound and inbound trips to 18 hours (1080 minutes) – that ruled out all the long layovers. I also made sure to uncheck the box that allows airport changes – leaving that checked, opens up a can of worms with possible Heathrow/Gatwick changes.
Anyone looking for some guidance on how to use the ITA Search Matrix should check out this post first, and then this one for a few more advanced ideas.
Bottom Line
As I’ve made pretty clear, I think only one of these deals is very good, another is ok while the others are nothing to get over excited about. But that’s just my opinion.
If you’re in dire need of tier points to maintain status and if you’re not a big fan of Bangkok, then the $2,216/£1,586/€2,007 fare to Hong Kong may be tempting. The one fare to definitely stay away from is the fare to Singapore…that’s truly a bad “deal”. It’s priced almost $1,000 more than fares I’ve seen in the past couple of months…and I’m reasonably sure that fares at that level will be back again.
If anyone finds better fares than the one’s I’ve posted please let me know and I’ll update this post to let everyone else know too.
