Any tips on how to search for international business class seats? I haven't used any reward miles in well over a decade and have nearly 900,000 points between United, Delta, American Express, Chase and Flying Blue. Finding seats that don't break the reward bank and don't involve 2 connections and 24 hours to get to Europe. No issue getting economy seats, but who wants to use points on that?

Good luck using airline miles. Post Covid it is tough to find business class seats to europe that do not cost a ton of miles without a silly route.

You can search via point.me and that works reasonably well. Or use one of the award booking services (point.me has one or AwardCat and there's a few others).

Where do you live and what airline do you fly the most? If you live near Houston/IAH then look for United flights specifically, because they tend to have the most direct flights to Europe.

A pro tip is to look for United mileage flights on Avianca's Lifemiles website, and book United flights with Lifemiles. You can transfer AMEX points to Lifemiles and then use those to book United flights, since they are Star Alliance partners. Lifemiles' website tends to have cheaper United mileage flights than the United website.

I have been playing the business class over the ocean game for a while. We live in Houston so most of the flights have been star alliance but I am confident that one day I will get to transfer chase points to flying blue or BA.

The advice is you need to be fairly flexible on your dates and destinations. I have not figured out how to really take advantage of open jaw itineraries, but we have been able to extend layovers into stopovers that allowed us to explore Istanbul and London. Airlines open discounted award availability it seems at random and you need to be ready to jump. Flying Blue just did this.

Flexible with dates mean being able to leave on a Friday, Sunday or Monday. I have also booked one way's without a return knowing that it will work out.

Flexible with destinations just means that after searching for a while you will figure out the hubs and may find award travel to a hub but not your chosen city, or you might want to land in a hub but the award travel is only if you continue on.

Where do you want to go and when?

I sometimes will book using AMEX travel (5x points if you are platinum) and buy down the cost difference from economy to business class using AMEX points.

dummble said:

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I have been playing the business class over the ocean game for a while. We live in Houston so most of the flights have been star alliance but I am confident that one day I will get to transfer chase points to flying blue or BA.

The advice is you need to be fairly flexible on your dates and destinations. I have not figured out how to really take advantage of open jaw itineraries, but we have been able to extend layovers into stopovers that allowed us to explore Istanbul and London. Airlines open discounted award availability it seems at random and you need to be ready to jump. Flying Blue just did this.

Flexible with dates mean being able to leave on a Friday, Sunday or Monday. I have also booked one way's without a return knowing that it will work out.

Flexible with destinations just means that after searching for a while you will figure out the hubs and may find award travel to a hub but not your chosen city, or you might want to land in a hub but the award travel is only if you continue on.

Where do you want to go and when?

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I'm in Houston. Yep, I was searching with Flying Blue last night....I transferred some AMEX points to them a few years ago when I was planning a trip to Italy, then COVID happened. Found some direct flights to Amsterdam for 65000 points in September and October. Pretty open on where we go, wife definitely wants to do Paris and we have some friends in Germany...figure we could start in AMS and work our way over 10 days to Paris

60 to 80k points per leg per person for Business Class from Houston to Europe or Asia is where you want to be. This lines up with the old award charts. You can divide the one way cash cost from the point cost, you want it to value your points at 3 to 4 cents.

Singapore Airlines has a Fifth Freedom route that goes from IAH to Manchester, that might be another option for you depending on if you want to start in the UK and fly something other than United.