Fare Alert: Paris To Bangkok Business Class From Under $1,700 (Star Alliance)

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A number of the Lufthansa Group airlines are currently offering a very attractive sub $1,700 roundtrip fare for travel between Paris Charles de Gaulle and Bangkok. The primary airlines involved are SWISS and Lufthansa but flights are also available on Austrian Airlines at select times of the year.

Headline Fare Rules

• Minumum stay is 4 nights*
• Maximum stay is 3 monhts
• 1 stopover permitted in each direction at €100 each
• Unlimited transfers permitted
• Valid for travel on/before 31 March 2020
• Tickets must be issued on/before 16 May 2019

Routing & Aircraft

A lot of the iteneraries on offer involve a mixture of airlines so it’s entirely possible to be routed through Frankfurt on the outbound (for example) and Zurich on the inbound parts of the journey.

For some months of the booking period it’s possible to book an all Austrian Airlines itinerary…

…and, if you’re selective with flights, it’s possible to book an all SWISS itinerary too.

Care should be taken with all SWISS itineraries as a large number of options appear to involve avoidable long layovers in at least one direction:

Personally speaking, I’d choose to fly on the SWISS 777 ahead of the other two options and then, probably, the Austrian 777 over the Lufthansa options (Austrian has great catering but I’m not a big fan of Lufthansa’s seats).

Fare Availability

The sub $1,700 fare is available for travel almost straight away and is on offer in every month between May 2019 and March 2020:

Searching & Booking

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 you can use to see all the Star Aliance options:

And here’s an example of search parameters which will limit the search to SWISS and eliminate most excessively long layovers:

Clearly you’ll need to tailor these to match your desired dates, currency etc…

All the flights I’ve found via the Matrix search tool are easy to find through Google Flights….

…and they seem to be equally easy to find through the airlines’ own websites.

Where To Credit The Flights

Lufthansa, Austrian and SWISS are members of the Star Alliance so there are a good number of loyalty programs to which you can credit these flights.

Booking any of the Star Alliance carriers 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 table 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.

Also, bear in mind that some credit cards only offer bonus points for booking directly with an airline (like the Platinum Card from American Express) so make sure you don’t use an OTA if you plan on using such a card.

Bottom Line

All in all, this is a pretty good Business Class fare for travel between Europe and Bangkok and it rivals the fares we’ve been seeing from the likes of KLM and Qatar Airways over recent months.

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) and make sure you consider which itineraries offer the more convenient departure times and the shortest layovers before you jump in to book.