Fare Sale

FYI -- Delta is now offering some sale fares to Europe, if you want to check those out. I'm not shilling for them, I use this example only to illustrate my rule that fares are best purchased 3-4 months out. If you do go to Delta, you'll see that the fares are valid April 2 to May 17, which is...3-4 months out. Useless for us family fliers, I'd love to do France in May, but that's exam time for everyone.

And besides, I'm not looking for economy tickets anyway. Can you tell I'm obsessed with flying business class? Well, that’s what happens when you fly it once. You want to get back.

Airlines don’t make it easy. They don’t need to drop their business class pricing – your average corporation has no problem paying $3,500 R/T to fly an executive overseas (justification: that exec will be productive on day 1 of the trip, as opposed to day 2; I suspect there’s a tax angle, too). So, you may see the occasional “sale” (currently, $2,500 for ATL-London on Delta, usually $3,300). It’s still not useful for most of the rest of us.

Back up here – how did I, under these pricing constraints, ever actually get a business class trip? Ahh, the good old days, when credit card companies were first partnering with airlines to award miles…before they really knew the math on it, and “loyalty” was a key airline concept. They’d find out that loyalty is only useful for a certain subset of business travelers; the rest of us book the cheapest airline, even if it’s just $5 less.

Still, it was the early days, and airline cards were handing out miles in bunches. Huge signing bonuses, plus jaw-dropping mileage multipliers. There was a famous instance of getting 1000 miles on a purchase of a brand of pudding cup. People went wild.

Also, airlines though that transparency was helpful. Delta had a published award chart, and darn it, getting to those award levels was pretty easy. For the 2010 trip my wife and I took, I think I spent 160,000 miles for the two of us, business class. Heck, I got nearly half of that just by signing up with the card.

Airlines have since learned to be stingier with their miles. You can still get decent award sign-ups, but from there…ok, take Delta. In 2010, see above, the award amount for business class to Europe was 40,000 miles per leg. And it was on a clear chart. Sure, they had limited availability, you had to book, like, 11 months out, but it was there.

In between then and now, Delta added tiering on their award inventory (there were some scattered 40,000 seats, but most were 55,000, or 80,000); pulled the award chart (now you didn’t know what their lowest, or base level was); started devaluing the miles annually. The current low-price I can find? 70,000 miles one-way (ATL-London, if you’re curious). In 8 years, they’ve nearly doubled the mileage requirement, amounting to an effective compounding inflation of 8% per year. The Consumer Price Index over that time is less than 2%. Insult to injury is that last year the base rate was 62,500. They upped it over 10% between 2017 and 18 alone!

The upshot – saving up your miles for a business class trip is tougher and tougher. Sure, my Delta miles don’t expire, but they become less and less valuable every day. I have to pile in a ton on every year just to keep my miles at purchasing power parity. 

Well, that’s less than helpful. So, for the fun of it – if you still want in, or, at least want to see if Business Class is worth your money, do the following. Get a Delta Gold Amex, shuttle everything through it that first year (I’m not advocating carrying a balance: just use it for whatever you can pay off; and avoid the purchases where you have to pay an interchange fee, typically 3%, for making the purchase). Then, make a handy referral for the card to your spouse. In year two, shuttle your spend through that card. You’ll get miles for the referral.

By the time you’re done, two years in, you *should* have enough miles for two one-way tickets in business. That’ll at least get you a taste. And, btw, you don't have to get a Delta Amex, you can do the same strategery with any travel card/airline partnership. I checked -- a plain United card gives you 40,000 in the first year for signing up, and they do post their award travel chart. 70,000 per one-way business class. You can get two of those in 3-4 years. 

OK, what about the way back? Used to be, airlines would soak you on a one-way, so this scheme didn’t work. Not anymore! Norwegian will happily sell you a one-way at regular discounted price. Southwest does it, too. So, for example, book your outbound flight Atlanta-London using your Delta miles (140,000 total for two; you may have to pay $10 in taxes), then fly coach back to New York on Norwegian for $434; grab the $98 flight from New York to Atlanta. All in? $1,074 for the flights. Now, the Amex card will have an annual fee, $95, but it’s waived the first year. So, maybe add $100 to the above. Call it $1,200 all-in. Not bad, for a 50% business class itinerary. Sure, it took you two years to build up, but I’d say it’s worth the effort. Just don't complain if it totally ruins coach for you.