How much money do you actually have to be to only fly business class, return to europe is genuinely $40k for two people.
Deadass have to have like $5m+ for it to make sense no?
Actually outrageous for like 12 hour flight I dont understand it but maybe im just too poor.https://x.com/SelfMadeBez/status/2119284256384094481?a=gPvmAo9yrmMkMaBiumg&s=19
I believe he is sincere, so I’ll explain. I fly business class often. When we traveled to Spain with our kid that was business tickets for all three of us, both ways. I returned from Canada to St Louis last month in business. The airfare to Spain for the 3 of us cost us $120. Not thousand. Dollars. From Montreal to St Louis it was something like $24. Again, dollars.
I have never paid anything over $150 for business class tickets. I’m talking about the entire price of the ticket, not business class surcharge. How do people think I can afford to travel so much? All the air fare and hotels, how do they think I pay for it all?
Here’s how it works. If you have an excellent (but not too excellent because that locks you out of opportunities) credit score and you carry no debt besides a mortgage, you can get tons of free stuff. You open a credit card, get rewards points, transfer them to the airline or a special account, close the card, rinse and repeat. Of course, this takes work. You need to know:
– which cards to open
– what is the sweet spot of excellent but not too excellent credit, and how to stay within that fairly small window
– when and how to close the cards so that you are not out of any money and don’t have to pay yearly fees
– how to convert points into airplane tickets and hotel stays, etc.
In case anybody worries that I’m engaged in something dishonest, when I travel for conferences, I never ask the university to reimburse my airfare. I inform them honestly that I will be using points, and the university only covers the registration, the conference hotel, per diem, shuttles, etc.
Aside from excellent (but not too excellent) credit, you need a very meticulous, focused personality to be able to carry it off. Obviously, none of this describes me. My husband is the travel manager of the family. He has spreadsheets, graphs, and a very complex system that makes this all work. He belongs to online communities that share tips and leads. He recorded a series of eight 30-minute videos to teach me how to take over the system in case of his death. I resisted massively, but he made me watch the videos and then pass tests on them.
Transatlantic air travel has gone to the absolute dogs. You need to be extremely healthy, be a person of leisure, or be crazily wealthy to undertake it. My trip to Spain in September is the perfect example. The flights kept getting canceled. I needed unanticipated hotel stays and to get new tickets on the fly if I wasn’t ready to sleep at the airport for three days. If I had to pay out of pocket for all this, it would be an economic disaster for me. But we have points, so a hotel and a fresh ticket with a different airline awaited me at every step of the journey for free or almost free. A young Peruvian couple that was on my canceled flights had to sleep at the airport for three days, but I wasn’t capable of such a feat, even when I was 30 years younger, let alone today.
Those people you see in business class seats never pay for those tickets with their own money. Often, their job pays. The rest do what we do. It pays, in a very literal sense, to have an excellent credit score and good financial literacy.
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