There are some terrific fares available today on Air Canada from Boston to Shanghai, China for travel in January and February: from $372 round trip.
Availabilty
Google Flights is not showing the lowest prices on this deal, but it’s a convenient place to start to find cheap dates. For example, you’ll see plenty of dates in January and February for $428 round trip (there are even more available than pictured)
As an example, I chose January 26th-February 4th and got that $428 price on Google Flights. Click the image below to go to Google flights and check out different dates:
When I put those dates into airfare meta-search site Momondo, they come down to $382 RT:
That’s a great price from Boston. Secret Flying has found some dates for even less — like January 21st to February 5th for $372:
While Google Flights is showing prices at $428, I found fares nearly this cheap from more mainstream booking engines like Expedia, where the price was $394 for my 1/26-2/4 dates above:
That first search result caught my eye as it mentioned getting 100% off the price of the flight by booking a package. Hotel + flight packages did in fact come up pretty cheap — from $493 for the full 9 nights plus the flight:
That said, it might not be a great deal. After all, I put in the same dates (1/26-2/4) at Kayak and found that rooms can be pretty cheap in Shanghai:
Although that’s a bit misleading as there are some restrictions on the Shanghai Slow Time Boutique according to Priceline:
Still, there might be some values to be found among the hotel + air packages with a bit of searching.
Book through Chase?
I couldn’t find any flights through the Chase Booking portal on the dates with the cheapest fares — I simply got an error saying “sorry, we couldn’t find any flights” when using my dates from above. But by modifying the dates a bit, I could find the $428 price — bookable with 28,477 Ultimate Rewards points if you have a Chase Sapphire Reserve card.
There’s no champagne and caviar, but that’s a lot less points than you’d pay for an economy class ticket on any award chart with which I’m familiar.
Bottom line
Those who primarily use miles to fly in first and business class likely won’t be interested in traveling this far in economy class. That said, plenty of people are happy with flying economy — particularly when prices are this cheap. It’s unfortunate that you can’t find the cheapest fares through the Chase portal, but at less than 29K round trip (and the ability to likely earn some miles for flying), that’s a pretty sweet deal for the distance. Of course, I’d recommend holding off on making additional plans around this fare as Air Canada hasn’t exactly been knocking it out of the park lately in terms of honoring what they advertise.
H/T: Secret Flying
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