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British Airways is currently offering some extremely good value Business Class fares to Vancouver – starting at just £1,205:
As you can see, the very cheapest fares are from Inverness and sometimes involve additional connections and long layovers, but you can book direct from London Heathrow for a little over £100 more:
The fares are available for travel from January to March 2019 and a five day minimum stay is required.
The best way to find the cheapest fares is to start your search using Google Flights, in order to see a wide range of dates at once, then check specific dates on Momondo, Kayak and Skyscanner to see whether they can find any cheaper options available via online travel agencies (they can often knock ~£100 off!).
Where to credit the flights
If we take the example of a simple London Heathrow-Vancouver return, you would earn 14,140 Avios (worth about £140) and 280 Tier Points, if you credited to British Airways Executive Club.
As usual, I’d suggest crediting British Airways Business Class flights to Alaska Mileage Plan instead, because you earn more miles and the miles are more valuable. London – Vancouver return should get you ~23,500 Alaska Mileage Plan Miles, which I’d value at about £400.
Bottom line
BA Business Class (and First Class) fare deals from the UK seem to be much better value than they used to be a couple of years ago. Club World isn’t the best Business Class product in the world (by a long shot!), but many people place a high value on the convenience of being able to fly direct from London.
Hat-tip: GSTP
Hi Joe, I’m really intrigued by what you guys frequently suggest about crediting to Alaska Airlines. When you do the math, it’s clear why you would want to credit over there. My question though is, realistically how easy is it to actually make useful redemptions of those Alaska airlines miles from London? You guys often refer to the Cathay Pacific reception sweet spot from London to Hong Kong, but what other decent opportunities are there? What if I don’t fly to Asia very often? And even if I did, how many reward seats are in those routes (typically very booked up) ? Would be great if you did a full post just about Alaska airlines and what you can do with it. I’d be interested to switch everything over to it if it looked good.
The advantage of Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong is that you have so many more flights to choose from. Both from the UK and Continental Europe – so it’s much easier to find award space than on BA.
We also tend to mention some of the weird and wonderful quirks of Alaska. Using stopovers in Asia on one-ways, etc. First Class from North America to Asia (my personal favourite…)
But if you don’t fancy Asia, you still have all of the AA (no surcharge) and BA (surcharge) options to North America.
Is the coverage as broad as BA for a London resident? Of course not. But you’re also earning more miles on paid flights in a premium cabin and spending fewer miles on rewards.
Hi Luke,
Good point – Alaska Miles can seem a little bit niche from a UK perspective (from the USA there are a lot more redemption options). That said, there are still plenty of great uses, and it’s not really dissimilar from any other type of Miles these days – in that you can either use Miles efficiently or badly. The real trick is to try to maintain a balance with a variety of different programmes, so that you can select the best type of mile for a particular redemption.
Aside from the greater value you can achieve with Alaska Miles, the other reason I like to flag it on these deals is because they’re quite hard to collect otherwise (unless you’re happy buying SPG Starpoints), whereas there are lots of different ways to collect Avios or Virgin Miles(for example) in the UK.
An Alaska ‘cheat sheet’ does sound good though – I’ll have a think and see what I can put together!