Questions and Answers

Hi,

I will be flying to Europe next summer to meet a river cruise which is roundtrip from Paris. I can either fly in and out of Paris or any other convenient European city as I will be a little flexible on both ends. I am a little overwhelmed when trying to find the best product for flying business class for this itinerary. I read about excellent options but there seems to always be a caveat, like whether that route always flies a certain aircraft. My departure city is CLT.

FWIW, I have ~160,000 AA miles, 80,000 DL, and 150,000 UR. I’m ok with flying business over and economy on the return. But if I’m spending the miles on business I want it to be worth it! I have only flown business internationally on AA and BA and the AA was just ok. The BA was great, primarily because it was a 380 and there was no one to block my exit from the window seat!

AirFrance business class in a reverse herring bone seat is good.
BA’s new A350 with reverse herringbone seats would be good as well
KLM is a nice option.
Turkish and Austrian are also decent options.
Singapore from JFK-FRA is a fun fifth freedom, as are Emirates JFK-MXP and EWR-ATH

There’s really no ‘best’ option across the pond. East Coast to Europe is a relatively short flight, West coast to Europe space is hard to come by.

Based on your guidelines, I’d recommend looking at direct options to France. The best business class experience across the ocean (all David’s recommendations are great), can quickly be downplayed by the oh-so-glorious inter-European business class.

La Compagnie may be worth considering as well, since they fly direct to Paris. [URL]https://onemileatatime.com/la-compagnie-new-business-class/[/URL]

Are you looking for one seat for each award flight or two? What month are you going? If you’re looking to find awards in business for two passengers, I believe you’re going to be light in mileage and/or points all the way around. Of course, you can always buy to top off if you can lock in something promising. If it’s only one passenger, you should, with a bit of good advance planning be able to do it across two different carriers. As for the timing, if this year is any indication of future trends, August had a lot of excellent award availability up until just recently. The best product going your way IMO is the Delta One Suite, flown out of ATL. If flying alone, I’d avoid KLM and AF because of their 2-2-2 layout. If I were doing this trip alone, I’d look first to take DL One Suites outbound out of ATL and return directly to CLT on AA, either in Business Class or Premium Economy.

Honestly if you’re in CLT, to me doing the nonstop to CDG even though it’s AA (fine, but I agree not “best”) wins over having to hop somewhere else either in the US or Europe.

Better would be LH nonstop to MUC, but then you have to get yourself to Paris.

IMHO the nonstop trumps relatively minor differences in the product.

I agree the AA non-stop would be preferable just due to no extra stops vs. a 1-stop. However, the LH business class is nothing special and then you’ve got intra-Europe business class. So if you really don’t want to do the non-stop I like [USER=1566]@Gia[/USER]’s CLT-ATL-CDG solution. I assume you’ll have true US domestic first class on the CLT-ATL route – which is better than intra-Europe business – and then the Delta One suite to CDG.