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Scandinavia has been the starting point for quite a few good Business Class deals recently (like the great fares to the US West Coast and Qatar Airways’ Business Class fares to Asia) and now Star Alliance has joined the party by posting some very good Business Class fares out of Scandinavia for travel to China.
I’m going to concentrate on Lufthansa’s fares to Beijing in this post to help illustrate what’s on offer but you should be aware that there are good fares available from Lufthansa and SWISS for flights to Beijing, Shanghai & Hong Kong from Helsinki, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Oslo….so make sure you check all of these out if you’re struggling to find a fare that works for you.
Lufthansa – Beijing Business Class
There are two fares on offer on this route:
Fare 1 – Headline Rules
- Book by 28 February 2019
- Travel by 31 March 2019
- Book at least 24 hours in advance
- Saturday night stay is required
- Maximum stay is 3 months
- No stopovers permitted
Fare 1 – Routing
The fares will route through Munich and Frankfurt….
…and you should be careful not to leave yourself with an unnecessarily long layover – these should be easily avoidable.
If you find flights with SWISS they’ll route through Zurich or Geneva.
Fare 1 – Availability
This is the cheapest of the fares on offer and, sadly, it’s also available for the shortest time.
You’ll find it available starting in a week’s time….
…and there’s a lot of availability in February…..
….and March….
…but a new fare (Fare 2) kicks in from April onwards.
Fare 1 – Booking
This fare is pricing up with ease on Lufthansa and Google Flights….
…and should be easy to find through most other large OTAs.
Fare 2 – Headline Rules
- Book by 17 February 2019
- Travel between 1 April and 31 October 2019*
- Book at least 24 hours in advance
- Saturday night stay is required
- Maximum stay is 3 months
- No stopovers permitted
* As you’ll see below I couldn’t find any good fares for travel in June or July
Fare 2 – Routing
Just as with the first fare you’ll find that the Lufthansa flights will route through Munich or Frankfurt….
…while any SWISS flights you find available will route through Geneva or Zurich.
Once again you’ll need to be on the lookout for long layovers (a lot seem to come up in the search results) but they’re easy to avoid with a little careful flight selection.
Fare 2 – Availability
This fare is slightly more expensive than the fare available through the end of March and this one makes its first appearance in April….
..and is widely available in May….
…before disappearing completely in June….
…and July….
…before reappearing in August….
…and continuing strongly in September….
…and October….
….before disappearing from November onwards.
Fare 2 – Booking
Once again it should be pretty easy to find the fares on the Lufthansa website….
…but if you prefer to book through an OTA then, as far as I can tell, most bring this fare up with eae as well.
Searching For The Fares
You can use Google Flights to find these fares if that’s the search you’re used to using but I prefer to use the Matrix Search as it seems to show more flight options.
Here’s an example of the search parameters I used to find the Helsinki – Beijing fares….
…but clearly you’ll need to tailor these to match your desired dates, destination, currency etc…
If you’re planing to search for the SWISS fares I suggest you use parameters similar to these….
…which will limit your results to SWISS and will filter out all the excessively long layovers that will clog up the results.
Where To Credit The Flights
Lufthansa and SWISS are members of the Star Alliance so there are a lot of loyalty programs to which you can credit these flights.
Booking through SWISS or Lufthansa will see you book “P” coded fares which, according to wheretocredit.com, will earn you the following (depending on where you credit the flights):
Click to enlarge
Make sure you look through this tables carefully before deciding how to book your fare and where to credit to and make sure you understand how credits towards elite status will work too.
Bottom Line
All in all these are pretty good fares for travel between Europe and Asia if not quite as good as what we see from Qatar Airways from time to time (although Qatar Airways fares are not of much use to flyers looking to keep Star Alliance status).
Make sure you have a play around with the various routes and destinations to make sure you check out all the deals and make sure you do your research on which aircraft offer which cabins as not all are created equal (SWISS Business Class will be better than Lufthansa).
HEL is not in Scandinavia.
Fair point…perhaps I should have used the term “Nordic Countries”