British Airways Business Class Sale and 10% British Airways Visa Discount

Update: The current offer for the British Airways Visa is 50,000 Avios when you spend $1,000 in the first 3 months.

British Airways has just launched a six-day fare sale for spring business class airfares from the US to Europe with fares starting as low as $2,816 roundtrip including all taxes and fees. This is by no means the cheapest fares, but for non-holiday or summer, it can be decent- especially if you stack the 10% discount as a British Airways Visa cardholder.

The special fare sales are transatlantic business “I” fares and must be booked by February 18  for travel between March 23-April 5, 2013, inclusive from gateway US cities to London and Europe on British Airways, and BA codeshares on American Airlines and Iberia as well as OpenSkies. All travel must be complete by April 6, 2013.

Fares are also available to:

>Edinburgh
>Manchester
>Amsterdam
>Barcelona
>Frankfurt
>Madrid
>Milan
>Paris
>Rome
>Venice
>Vienna

Just note that even though these fares are cheaper than normal, if you change your itinerary you’ll incur a $500 change fee.

Just doing a quick search on BritishAirways.com, a roundtrip business class ticket from March 24-31 on British Airways from New York JFK to London Heathrow came in at $2,794.

Pricing the same itinerary the week after the promotion ends, the same ticket came to a whopping $5,429 – nearly twice as much.

This itinerary from Miami to Madrid flying Iberia on the outbound and American back came in at $3,200 during the promo period.

Whereas the following week the same itinerary would have cost nearly $4,800, representing a 50% higher fare.

The other good news is that some other airlines already seem to be matching some of the fares including Delta on the London route, which I found on a quick Orbitz search for the same dates.

Though the only comparable fare on the Miami-Madrid was this $3,111 itinerary on US Airways transiting through Philadelphia each way.

Another 10% Off

Although these fares are substantially cheaper than normal, they still represent a large cash outlay. One bright spot is that if you have the British Airways Visa, you get a 10% discount off any British Airways flight when you book tickets with your card and use the Promotional Code CARDOFFERU, and the discount is off the total – so the base fare as well as all taxes and fees. The terms of this promotion say that it cannot be combined with any other offer, but when I clicked on the promo link and logged into my Executive Club account and booked the ticket while logged in then entered the promotional code CARDOFFERU, it took a further $280 off my JFK-LHR itinerary bringing it down to $2,515.

$2,500 isn’t an amazing value considering we’ve seen fares as low as $1,500-1,800 for business class tickets to Europe, but it’s still a discount on what the full fares would be and getting nearly $300 more off is an extra little bonus. So if this long, cold winter has got you hankering for a European spring fling and you were considering buying business class anyway, might as well get it at a discount if you can firm up your plans within the next six days and travel within the promotional window.

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