Questions and Answers

I’m visiting Iceland this fall and a friend and I are taking a few days in Europe on either side of our tour. We picked cities that have non-stop service to/from KEF on Icelandair but each of the flights is over 3 hours long with one being nearly 4 hours long.

For flights of that length we’d love to get premium economy seats and have a little extra legroom but the prices I’m seeing are outrageous. The price for regular economy is under $300 but PE is nearly $1200. If I was going to spend that I’d go for business class as it’s just $1300. Anybody else have guesses as to why it costs so much?

There are business class award seats on each of our flights but we can’t use Alaska miles there since the flight is not to/from North America, right? Do I have any other points options? It seems like JetBlue is a partner but I don’t have a good way to get those miles as it seems the transferable currencies don’t have favorable rates.

I can’t answer your points question however my brother and SIL (no status, no miles) were offered upgrades from Economy to Business Class last year, two days before their flight for $350 each way. Not sure how common this is.

Premium Economy is super trendy, and I think people try and book it assuming that business class is going to be prohibitively expensive.

No great points options, so a cash-back style card and hoping for a cash upgrade might be the best choice here. Sounds fun!

Thought I’d follow up. We decided to go ahead and purchase our tickets only to find that what Google Flights track is a fare that does not include any checked bags. It appears that it’s cheaper to buy a bundled price with that built in vs. paying for a checked bag later. (I know lots of folks in this crowd don’t believe in checking bags but I do for my longer trips.) So our prices ended up being a bit more expensive that we thought but still far cheaper than premium economy.