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There are some phenomenal Business Class fares available at the moment from London to Bangkok – starting at just £975 return.
The very cheapest fares I saw were with Bahrain-based Gulf Air in May (example below is 10th-17th May 2018):
Longer stopovers were available for £50-100 more. Momondo seemed to be finding the lowest prices, but it’s always worth checking others like SkyScanner and Kayak too. Availability seemed patchy for the dates I was looking at, but I didn’t get chance to investigate further.
Gulf Air operates a (fairly) decent looking 2-2-2 lie-flat Business Class product. Until the end of April 2018, you can credit the flights at 100% of flown distance to American AAdvantage. After then, I think Cathay Pacific Asia Miles is probably the best option.
If you’re looking for something a bit more 5*, the superb Garuda Business Class fares between London and Bangkok are also still available, from £1033 return:
Available dates should be between: 11th April – 12th July; 16th August – 8th December; 25th December – 31st December 2018.
Again, Momondo seemed to find the lowest fare, but do check other comparison sites too.
Garuda is a Skytrax 5 * airline and I’ve only ever heard good things over the last few years – there’s a great review of Business Class here and you can read more on the Garuda website here.
As regards where to credit the flights, Garuda is a member of the SkyTeam alliance and has other partners too, so you’ve got lots of choice.
I would personally go for ANA Mileage Club I think, though KLM / Air France Flying Blue or Etihad Guest might be more popular choices. All three of them offer 125% of flown Miles, so you’d be looking at earning something like 21,000 Miles.
Garuda has been known to offer extremely generous Miles redemption promotions in the past, so you may even wish to consider crediting to GarudaMiles.
Bottom line
Business Class deals from the UK seem to be a lot cheaper so far this year than we’ve seen in the past. When you can fly to Asia for under £1,000 from London Heathrow on good airlines, it’s hard to see the point of spending time and money repositioning to Dublin/Prague/Scandinavia, like we often suggested in the past.
You can save some money on the rather excessive passenger tax duty by arriving in the UK within 24 hrs of departure
Do you know of an easy way to reclaim the APD when you arrive on one ticket and depart on another?
Now that would be very useful to know. And whether you can do so as a British citizen & resident.
It does not matter what is you country of citizenship.
You can claim APD from the airline you are traveling with departing from the UK.
Keep the boarding pass for your incoming flight, of course.
Once you arrive at your final destination submit both boarding passes to the airline you travelled out of the UK and be patient. But it does work.
Hi Sylwek,
Interesting stuff! – I’ve always thought this might be possible but haven’t looked into it closely. I’d love to do a post on the process (and find out how to do it for myself regardless!). Would you mind if I sent you a quick email to discuss it further?
Thanks Joe for another great post. I was interested in your suggestion that ANA Mileage Club might be a good place to credit Garuda flights, and wondered if you could expand on your reasoning?
Many thanks for the kind words!
Basically, ANA has pretty good normal award pricing, but also offers a separate ludicrously generous (if you can make good use of it) Round-The-World award chart too. There’s a (US-centric) outline of some of the highlights here: https://awardwallet.com/blog/maximize-ana-mileage-club-award-sweet-spots/
This one is much more detailed actually: http://roverbob.com/2016/10/12/ana-round-world/
ANA sweetspots… 88K miles return in Business Class to North America. 68K miles return in Business to Africa / Middle East. 80-94K miles in Business Class to Asia.
Basically you’re flying return in Business Class for the same number of miles as BA wants for a one-way and you can often avoid surcharges. ANA does have a hard expiry policy though, which is why you need access to Starpoints to top up.
https://insideflyer.co.uk/2017/03/reward-charts-summary/
Thanks both for the very helpful replies.