Business Class Fares: New York – Europe From Under $1,300 RT (OneWorld & SkyTeam)

---

TravelingForMiles.com may receive commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on TravelingForMiles.com are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. TravelingForMiles.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers.

Some links to products and travel providers on this website will earn Traveling For Miles a commission which helps contribute to the running of the site – I’m very grateful to anyone who uses these links but their use is entirely optional. The compensation does not impact how and where products appear on this site and does not impact reviews that are published.

Just yesterday I was pointing out how it may be an idea for travelers to start ignoring promotions on the sale of airline miles and concentrate on some of the great Business Class deals we’ve been seeing quite regularly of late (at least on trans-Atlantic routes) and here we have anther great set of examples of what I meant.

Both oneWorld and SkyTeam have some excellent fares for summer travel between New York and various European cities. The lowest prices can be found on British Airways courtesy of the AARP and the Chase discounts but, even if you don’t have access to those, these are definitely fares that should be of interest.

OneWorld Business Class Fares

(HT: Flyertalk)

The better oneWorld fares appear to be centered on travel between New York and France or Amsterdam and the key to the cheapest fares is a combination of booking through British Airways, AARP and the Chase BA Visa card.

Key Information:

• Great fares available for travel between 4 July and 22 August 2016
• Must book by 24 June 2016
• Must book a minimum of 21 days in advance
• Cheapest fares require a minimum stay of 7 days (other reasonable fares available too)
• No stopovers permitted on cheapest fares

Finding The Deals:

Once I saw the Flyertalk thread linked above I used ITA Matrix to see what I could find.

An important component of making sure you see all the fares available is to not restrict the search to JFK….make sure you search all New York airports as some good deals originate in Newark.

These are the search parameters I used (insert your preferred destination to see if it’s on sale):

New York – Lyon

The fares start in the low $1,700…..

….but the cheapest fare you find on ITA Matrix isn’t necessarily how you get to the lowest price you pay.

If you book using British Airways, the original fare can be slightly higher than the cheapest fares available:

But, if you have the BA Visa Card from Chase, you can enter the promo code “CARDOFFERU” and get a 10% discount on that fare:

Things get even better if you have AARP membership (anyone can have membership, it’s not age restricted) and use the AARP portal. You can combine the $400 AARP discount with the 10% Chase discount to get the fare down to just $1,242!

You have to be careful which flights you select if you want the full discount as the 10% discount and AARP discount only seem to combine (in this case) for flights booked through British Airways and flown on British Airways aircraft.

Examples of other oneWorld Business Class Fares:

New York – Nice

New York – Amsterdam

And I’m sure there will be more such examples if you search hard enough.

Don’t forget that the fares above are the prices without the AARP and Chase discounts so all the fares can be had for under $1,300 roundtrip.

Maximizing Your oneWorld Earnings

If you book though British Airways you can still credit your flights to American Airlines’ AAdvantage program and, if you’re going to do that, you’ll be considerably better off if you travel before 31 July.

• Before 31 July you can earn up to 50,000 bonus AAdvantage Miles in the current American Airlines promotion.
• Before 31 July you can earn 1,600 Business Extra points per trans-Atlantic round trip.

The one uncertainty in all of this is how many redeemable AAdvantage Miles you will earn. As I’ll show in a post later today there is no guarantee that American Airlines won’t change the partner earning charts when it gives us more information on the AAdvantage devaluation in the next few weeks.

SkyTeam Business Class Fares

While with SkyTeam there is no comparable AARP or Chase discounts the fares are still very attractive.

Key Information:

Most of the details for the SkyTeam fares are exactly the same as for the oneWorld fares above:

• Fares available for travel between 4 July and 22 August 2016
• Must book travel by 24 June 2016
• Must book travel a minimum of 21 days in advance
• Cheapest fares require a minimum stay of 7 days
• No stopovers permitted on cheapest fares

Finding The Deals:

Unsurprisingly I found the SkyTeam deals via the ITA Matrix search and this is an example of the parameters I used:

Once again it’s important to make sure than the search takes in all New York airports and not just JFK.

Here are the fares I found:

New York – Lisbon

Example flights:

New York – Brussels

New York – Vienna

Example flights:

Bottom Line

One of the key things to remember is that, if you find your preferred European destination doesn’t have a nicely discounted Business Class fare associated with it, you can always use one of the fares listed above and then use a cheap, separate, short-haul fare (possibly on a low-cost carrier) to get you to where you really want to go.

These are some very attractive deals – especially if you can use the AARP and Chase discounts on British Airways – and it will be interesting to see how long we keep seeing deals like this appear.

Yes, these particular great fares are for summer travel when Business Class flying is at one of it’s lowest points of the year…but we’ve also been seeing discounted Business Class fares for other times of the year too (like here and here).

The more airlines show a willingness to discount their Business Class tickets to levels such as these the less merit there will be to stocking up on redeemable miles…at least as far as trans-Atlantic travel goes. That could be a thought worth bearing in mind going forward.

iOS users can get all of Traveling For Miles’ content Free on Apple News (click here)