Great Star Alliance Business Class Award Availability to Europe
Update: Some offers mentioned below are no longer available. View the current offers here.
Business class awards from the US to Europe can be difficult to come by, especially if you're looking for multiple seats. But right now Star Alliance partner Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) has open award space for at least 4 passengers on a number of routes to Copenhagen.
The majority of this space is in the months of February and March, with a few random dates in January and early April. Nonstop flights are open from Chicago, Washington D.C. and San Francisco.
Search for this space by starting with one of the Star Alliance partner websites such as United, Aeroplan, or ANA, then book the seats with your preferred Star Alliance mileage program.
Using United's award calendar and searching for 4 seats at once, you can see there are a lot of days with availability from Chicago to Copenhagen, most of which are for the SAS nonstop leaving at 10:05pm:
And you'll have no problem getting back to Chicago on the 3:40pm nonstop...
Here's the availability from Washington-Dulles — we're seeing around half of each month with space for 4 business class passengers on the 5:15pm nonstop:
There's about the same amount of space to get home to Washington as well — the nonstop leaves Copenhagen at 12:20pm:
And here's San Francisco to Copenhagen for 4 passengers — not quite as good, but still a number of options:
Getting back to San Francisco is harder in February, though there are lots of midweek options in March:
You can book these flights for 70,000 United miles or 55,000 Aeroplan miles each way, and neither program passes along fuel surcharges for flights on SAS. Jumping from Copenhagen to the rest of Europe is relatively easy with a short flight.
We reviewed Scandinavian's A330 lie-flat business class seat, which is flown on the Washington-Dulles to Copenhagen route and found it to be fantastic, so this is a great opportunity to get an entire family to Europe in style over the next few months. You should find a similar product on flights operated by an A340 as well.
You can transfer Ultimate Rewards points you've earned with a card like the Chase Sapphire Preferred or Chase Sapphire Reserve to United instantly, or you can transfer Membership Rewards points to Aeroplan instantly, earned with cards like The Platinum Card from American Express and Premier Rewards Gold.
H/T: Windbag Miles via View From The Wing
