Business Travel to Italy, next spring
 

My wife and I are planning a 3 week vacation to Italy to celebrate our retirement. I would like to travel on business class but my usual carrier Delta airlines requires a Y class ticket plus 50,000 miles, the Y class ticket (upgradable coach) costs $3,500 while a regular business cost ~ $3,900. Their program certainly is not designed to reward their customers.
I would appreciate any suggestions on discounted and reliable travel sites that offer business class tickets. Milan or Rome are viable arrival options. Have you had good experiences with discounted sites and the airlines that they represent. Your suggestions will greatly appreciated.

You are 5 years late !

I'm confused. What was your point?

Take a look at openskies.com. It gets you to Paris. Train from there?

The discount consolidators have not been around for at least 5 years--or more. I too would love to find one.

To get a business class seat you either need to buy a full price coach and upgrade with miles - which you don;t want to do - or trade in a while lot of premium miles (which I assume you don't have)to get around the fares.

No one is giving away business class seats. And for most flights they are full of business class travelers whose companies are paying corporate business fares for them.

The business model you are searching ceased to exist after the deregulation and online booking especially the emergence of Priceline. The essence of airline booking now is not WHERE you buy, but capture a fleeting moment where airfare to certain destinations on certain days are weak. Consolidators were needed many decades ago when the airline industries did not have the instantaneous actual market demand data and had to rely to someone else to share the risk of unsold tickets. With web based booking and analytics, they could do it themselves and capture the maximum revenue by matching the offerings to the actual market demand.
One place to start understanding the market is to program fare alert, such as kayak.com to inform you daily (weekly is default) best price to different destinations on specific days. Obviously in the market based industry, you want to avoid high demand days - school vacations, major holidays, etc. I routinely have more than 20 daily fare alerts with different scenarios to see which way the market is moving.
Also important is how well your flight integrates into the rest of the itinerary. I see many people elated to find a cheap fare to one destination only to find that in order to make it work with the rest, they had to spend more than what they thought they saved on the airfare and use up more days not at destinations.
Another caveat is that not all the business class are the same and neither are the economy class. On Air France, the Premium Economy seats are almost like business class seats, but with less pitch but priced between the business class and the economy.

I'm not familiar with Delta or its FF program, but we recently flew an Air France (codeshare Delta) flight from LAX to CDG in premium economy (called economy comfort by Delta) and had a very good experience starting with early boarding, more seat and leg room, and priority lines at passport control.

Well said, Greg.

<< the Y class ticket (upgradable coach) costs $3,500 while a regular business cost ~ $3,900. Their program certainly is not designed to reward their customers.>>

So for an extra $400 you can get a guaranteed seat and price to chosen destination -- that's what I'd go for. Then you would get miles from this trip for your next trip, minus the hassle.

What everyone said above. I've used Delta for some time to gather miles because they go where I want to go. However, I have been transitioning to United because I've had far better luck with their program and with actually obtaining seats with miles.

But as mentioned above, it's a matter of constant checking to grab the seats when they open up in the computer systems.

I check on Kayak and related sites but generally focus on the Delta site itself.

It depends on when you want to travel and how many miles you have with Delta. A low mileage bix ticket on Delta to Europe is 100,000 miles (economy low is 60,000). Delta does not make it easy to search. They intentionally leave their awards calendar broken and make it very hard to search tickets. There are dozens of threads about it on Flyertalk. If you have enough miles, use the tips on FT to find flights.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...ss-awards.html

I also find I get better and faster info if I call the airlines, even if I have to pay a fee to book the FF itinerary with a human. But, again, I'm not familiar with Delta so I don't know if this is an option.

To upgrade with miles on Delta, you can also buy B or M class (one and two steps below full-fare Y, respectively) tickets, but those tickets will usually come with more restrictions than full-fare unrestricted Y. Do you need full-Y for the flexibility? Alternatively, look for Z-class paid business tickets on Delta. Sometimes DL will have a sale where Z is cheaper than Y.

I randomly plugged in a 3-week trip beginning in early April from BNA (Nashville, TN) -- not sure what your dates or originating city are -- and see that M class is running about $150 cheaper than Y.

The ITA Matrix matrix.itasoftware.com will definitely help you in your search.

In your case, go to that website, click on the little links below origin and destination cities that say "advanced routing codes", and type in the following:

Origin: (your airport code -- ATL, JFK, BNA, ORD, etc.)
ARC: dl+ / f bc=z|bc=y|bc=b|bc=m
Destination: FCO, MXP
ARC: dl+ / f bc=z|bc=y|bc=b|bc=m

And then search by calendar. You can enter more than one origin and/or more than one destination if you want to search for possible open-jaw flights.

The ARC's that you're entering are a series of filters that limit returns to only Delta (the + means "more than 1 flight"), with booking classes of Z, Y, B, or M. Make sure to type the spaces exactly as I have them, and the vertical bar is the "pipe" command (typically, shift-backslash) which means "or". Matrix will return whatever fare is the cheapest from that list.

Here's some more help on ITA routing codes:
http://flyerguide.com/wiki/index.php...y_ITA_Software

To follow up on what Jean said, you can also fly Premium Economy on either Air France or Alitalia via Delta codeshares. These tickets are about $1700-$2000 each, give or take. They are for-sale on Delta as W class. If you're searching directly on Delta, however, do an advanced, fare-based search for "Y and above" instead of the more obvious "W and above".

In ITA-scriptese, the ARC would be "dl+ /f bc=w"

I flew Alitalia in Premium Econ to/from Rome a month ago, and it was wonderful. It is its own separate cabin, and the seats are just what you'd expect: better than cattle car, but not quite business. I'm 6'-3" and had plenty of leg room on the flight JFK-FCO (on an A-330), and I even slept for about a third of the trip, considering that I can usually sleep on an airplane otherwise for, oh, 0.0844 seconds. Coming back FCO-JFK was on a 777, and I was less impressed with the legroom.

Nevertheless, if the fare was affordable, I'd take Premium Econ again in a heartbeat.

Using the same dates and origin/destination as in my example previously, W class on Delta is <b>$1735</b> for roundtrip BNA-JFK-MXP (sometimes with a preliminary stop in either DTW or ATL).