Use These 9 Tricks to Fly in Business Class for Less

25.08.2023 - 12:07 / afar.com / Katy Nastro

Business class travel, with its lie-flat seats and elevated food service, is the epitome of luxury and comfort when it comes to commercial air travel. While the price tag can often be eye-watering, savvy travelers have discovered numerous strategies for securing more affordable upgrades to business.

Here are some ways that you can fly business class for less.

More than 50 airlines worldwide (including Air Canada, Fiji Airways, LATAM, Lufthansa, Qantas, and Virgin Atlantic, to name a few) offer bidding programs, where guests who already have an economy ticket can try to score heavily discounted business-class seats by bidding for them.

Airlines with bidding programs typically work with a third-party travel technology company called PlusGrade. Travelers can visit the airline’s bidding page, enter their confirmation number, and place their bid.

Airlines will set a certain sum, usually around $300, as the bidding floor, so you’ll have to offer at least that amount to be in the running. When you bid, you’ll be asked to provide your credit card information. If you win (you’ll find out by the day of departure at the latest), the money will automatically be withdrawn using the credit card you provided and your ticket will be updated. It’s worth noting that bids need to be made separately of for each leg, it’s not for the round-trip ticket.

The only thing better than cheap flights are free flights.

“Using points and miles is by far the most accessible way for non-millionaires to fly in the front of the plane,” Katy Nastro, a travel expert at Going, tells AFAR. “It may seem that you need an awful lot of points to be able to redeem for business class flights, when in fact that often isn’t the case. For example, Going’s flight experts found a business class deal to Spain for only 54,000 points round-trip plus tax (compared to the normal price of more than 150,000 points for the business class seat). That same flight paid in cash: well over $3,000.”

Kyle Potter, executive editor at Thrifty Traveler, a travel and flight deals website, echoed that sentiment, saying, “Business class seats might regularly cost five or six times as much as economy, but this is where airline miles can really shine: It won’t always cost you a boatload more miles. In fact, some of the best mileage redemptions out there are for business class seats at what you might pay for economy seats through other airlines. And transferable credit card points from banks like Chase, Amex, and Capital One can make it relatively easy for even infrequent travelers to get the miles they need to pull these off.”

Some recent great deals Potter noted include:

Angel Trinh, founder of Pennywise Traveler, a blog that teaches people how to best use their points