Business class for 4 or more: finding multiple seats for family award travel

Yesterday, Greg posted soliciting ideas for our next Frequent Miler challenge (side note: I have loved reading the comments — so many great ideas!). A number of readers mentioned in the comments that they would like to see challenges that require flying multiple passengers. Many readers travel with a family and struggle to find award availability. While I can certainly sympathize with that, I simultaneously find family award travel to be doable, you just may need to think differently. In this post, I wanted to demonstrate how to make family award travel possible, even during peak dates.

Be flexible

I know that many parents read the above section header (“Be flexible”) and clicked “back” in their browser, but for those of you who haven’t given up at the mere suggestion of flexibility, consider the ways in which you can be flexible rather than focusing on what isn’t flexible.

Over the weekend, we spoke at the Chicago Seminars. During an “Ask Us Anything” presentation, an audience member asked what draws us to a particular destination for our personal trips. I answered, “Award availability”. The crowd laughed as you might imagine, but the truth is that it was only said half-jokingly. While I can tell you techniques that I use to find award availability, there is no technique bigger than destination flexibility. Planning my trips based on what awards are available has been responsible for many of the destinations I’ve enjoyed over the past 7 or 8 years — and I’ve gotten to many amazing places that way, both places that I knew I wanted to visit and places that had never been on my radar.

That is to say that if you are dead set on skiing in Aspen for Christmas, I don’t have some secret sauce to make the seas part and award availability for multiple passengers to magically appear. If that’s your goal, you’ll have to start early and search and search repeatedly day and night and still get pretty lucky if your goal is highly specific peak destinations at peak travel times. You’re probably better off focusing your efforts on cash back and/or points that can be used to book cash fares if you prioritize specific dates and destinations rather than prioritizing availability.

However, if you instead determine that you want to travel somewhere during the summer school break and you have a couple hundred thousand Membership Rewards points to work with, there is probably something cool you can do.

In my opinion, part of the beauty of this game is that there are always more points to earn. I am therefore generally less concerned with checking a specific destination off of a bucket list and more interested in figuring out what’s available for my family of four and what items should be on my bucket list at or near that destination. In cases where I have a specific destination in mind, I know that I need to be willing to jump on the first option I see with four seats in business class that gets me close to my desired destination (I can work on filling in the blanks on short gaps via train / car rental / additional flights). I understand that style won’t work for everyone, but particularly if you’re a family traveler beholden to the school schedule, that type of approach makes it far easier to find options.

Examples to Europe in summer 2023

For example, let’s say that you have a family of four and your goal is to travel to Europe during the summer school break in 2023. Many would (correctly) advise you to begin looking for award seats as soon as the booking calendars open 11 or 12 months ahead of time, but even now (about 8-9 months ahead) there are still options to be found so long as you approach such a trip by more broadly looking for a flight to Europe rather than to a specific country within Europe.

For instance, if you can put up with moderate carrier-imposed surcharges, you’ll find quite a bit of availability between Boston and Amsterdam next summer on Air France / KLM, which is probably best booked through Virgin Atlantic. See this calendar where the dates in green have availability for four passengers for 58,500 miles plus about $252 in taxes & fees per passenger one way.

At the time of writing, both Chase and Capital One are offering 30% transfer bonuses to Virgin. That means you would need to transfer just 45,000 points per passenger from either program to get the 58,500 total points needed (and also keep in mind that you can also transfer from Amex, Citi, or Bilt to Virgin Atlantic, albeit without a transfer bonus at the time of writing).

However, I said it is “probably” best booked via Virgin Atlantic because absent a transfer bonus to Virgin and/or present a transfer bonus to Air France / KLM Flying Blue, you might do better booking via Flying Blue, particularly if you’re traveling with kids. Keep in mind that kids aged 2-11 get a 25% discount on long-haul redemptions and that could work out to be a better deal. For instance, here is space for 2 adults and 2 kids on Saturday, July 22nd from Boston to Paris and onward to Amsterdam. At 218,750 miles and $816.40 for four passengers, that’s a net cost of less than 55K miles and $204.10 per passenger in taxes and fees one way.

Notice that the first itinerary above has seats for eight passengers at that price. On a Saturday. In July.

Also keep in mind that there is a current targeted Amex Offer for 20,000 Membership Rewards points when you spend $1,000 or more with Air France (enrollment required). I would expect that paying award taxes would trigger that offer — so if you’re booking 5 seats, you could stand to get 20,000 Membership Rewards points to sweeten the deal a bit further (though note that Amex travel protections may not be ideal for your situation).

Unfortunately, at the moment, I don’t see much availability for Delta flights next summer via Virgin Atlantic — but these options on Air France / KLM are much more available in some circumstances and are still a decent deal. Delta availability really ebbs and flows (you’ll see nothing for months and then suddenly see 8 seats on some flights), but one nice thing about booking via Virgin Atlantic is that you should be able to change or cancel and rebook for a reasonable fee if you’ve booked your Air France flights via Virgin — meaning that if Delta later releases a bunch of availability, you could cancel your Air France / KLM flights and rebook Delta flights to save some more money and points. If you book via Flying Blue, keep in mind that Air France charges a $50 cancellation fee per ticket (and there’s no telling whether Delta flights will be available / competitively priced via Flying Blue).

Consider splitting up

In an ideal world, you’d be able to find multiple seats on every flight during peak dates. In reality, that just isn’t always easy. However, if splitting up the family is an option, you might have more success.

For instance, if you have a family of 5, it can sometimes seem daunting to find premium cabin availability for everyone. However, it isn’t impossible to do. No, you might not find four seats to Paris during the middle of summer vacation, so you may need to think outside the box a bit. LOT Polish flies out of both New York(JFK) and Newark(EWR) and perhaps you could put two of you on one flight and three on the other (or let one of your kids invite a friend since there are six total seats available between those two airports on the following Thursday in late July):

Of course, don’t abandon all hope of finding five seats. While it’s not exactly common to find five seats to Europe in business class during peak summer dates, once again Warsaw comes to the rescue with 5 seats on a Sunday flight out of New York-JFK as shown below (and they actually have two flights out of JFK that day, so feel free to book 5 passengers on one flight and 2 passengers on the other flight if you travel with a near Brady Bunch-sized family).

Keep in mind that Air Canada isn’t your cheapest option for that specific itinerary, it’s just a user-friendly Star Alliance search tool that I’m using to demonstrate availability. If I really wanted to book that specific flight, I’d probably book it via Turkish Miles & Smiles for 45,000 miles and $85 per passenger (and yes, it is available for 5 passengers through Turkish as I write this post).

And if you can’t find enough space from a single gateway, remember that you may find space out of two different gateways on the same date. This may require positioning part of the family to another airport, but that may be worthwhile.

For instance, a couple of months ago, Stephen wrote about availability from both Los Angeles and San Francisco to Fiji (and onward to New Zealand or Australia). We decided to hop on that availability and book it for the four of us (my wife and I and our two sons) and we also booked a couple of other people. In that case, we booked some of us from Los Angeles to Fiji and others from San Francisco to Fiji on the same date. The flights to Fiji are scheduled to arrive just 35 minutes apart.

In either case, all of us will need to position to California anyway — so part of our party will position to Los Angeles and part will position to San Francisco and we’ll all end up in the same destination at about the same time. Had I limited my search to 6 or 8 passengers from the same gateway on the same date, I would have missed the chance for all of us to arrive in Fiji in business class within very close time proximity. Consider looking at multiple gateways if you prioritize flat bed business class over leaving from the same airport on the same flight.

Consider alternate gateways in both directions

But wait! What’s that you say? You want to go to Europe, but you don’t want to go to Warsaw? No problem! There are tons of places you can get to in Europe for less than $100 per passenger on July 31st (the arrival day on the the example itineraries to Warsaw shown in the previous section). Using Google flights you can search from Warsaw to Europe (just type “Europe” in the destination box instead of a city name) and even set the parameters to only display flights under $100 (as shown below). Here’s a link to that specific search.

Many of the lowest prices above are on low cost carriers (which means they won’t cost so little after you add checked bags unless you use the travel credits on one of your credit cards to cover them – I like the Ritz card airline incidental fee credits for this), but you can adjust up and down as need be.

If you prefer to use points rather than cash for the last connection(s) within Europe, keep in mind that several programs offer decent deals for flights within Europe. I generally don’t care whether intra-European flights are in economy or business class since intra-European business class is usually just economy class seats with the center seat blocked. You might consider booking your business class award to Europe with one program and then book separately onward to your destination within Europe. Some decent deals for intra-Europe flights:

• Oneworld flights cost just 12,500 miles each way in economy class (plus taxes) via American Airlines AAdvantage
• Virgin Atlantic charges as few as 4,000 miles in economy or 8,000 miles in business class on itineraries within Europe on Air France / KLM, and the distance-based chart is potentially a little hackable. See this post: Air France & KLM across Europe for less [Sweet-Spot Spotlight].
• United charges fewer miles for very short Star Alliance flights with no fuel surcharges
• Air Canada Aeroplan charges from 7,500 miles each way in economy class with no fuel surcharges (or from 15K in business class).

Depending on which program you’re using to book, you obviously may be able to get beyond your European entry point without paying more miles. For instance, for the same 70K miles that Aeroplan would charge to fly from New York to Warsaw, a family of five could continue on to Vienna in business class.

Keep in mind that the same itinerary should be available via other Star Alliance airlines – and it would cost fewer miles through some of them (for example, LifeMiles would charge 63K miles in business class). I’m using Air Canada Aeroplan as an example here because it is a convenient-to-use Star Alliance search tool.

If you actually are a member of the Brady Bunch and you really need to get 2 parents, 6 kids, and Alice the housekeeper to Europe, you’re not necessarily without options. JFK to Geneva appears to have nine seats in business class on July 30th as well.

I was initially concerned that may be some sort of phantom availability, but searching day by day showed some days with no business class availability and quite a few with at least four seats (along with a handful of dates with space for 9), so I think it should be bookable. I did find the same seats through other Star Alliance programs.

And keep in mind of course that you can apply the same techniques in either direction. For instance, I pretty easily found four passengers returning from Dublin to Washington-Dulles about a week after the example flights above.

Consider splitting dates

While far from ideal, as a last resort I might even consider flying my family on two separate back-to-back dates, especially if I’m booking using highly flexible miles (which would allow me to make a change if a couple more seats open up on one itinerary or another).

For instance, we reported earlier this year on Qatar business class availability to the Seychelles during Spring 2023. At the time, I couldn’t find four seats on dates that worked for us, but I ended up splitting my family and booking us on back-to-back consecutive days near the beginning of a school break. In other words, I booked my wife and one son on Day 1 and our other son and me and Day 2.

That would mean arriving at our destination a day apart. I can’t say with certainty that we’d actually take those flights as scheduled because of the relative inconvenience of traveling separately, but since most American Airlines awards are free and easy to cancel / change, I hopped on the change to lock up two seats on each of those two convenient dates. I figured that I could continue searching over the coming months with the hope that two more seats would open on either my wife’s flight or mine. If two more seats opened on one flight or the other, I’d simply change the other two passenger’s itineraries to get us all together on a single flight. If additional availability never opened, we could cancel the trip altogether without penalty thanks to American’s easy change and cancellation policies. I booked backup flights to Hawaii for the same dates in case the Seychelles doesn’t work out.

Apply that same technique to your flights leaving Europe and you may even be able to hack things a bit. For instance, I found multiple sets of back-to-back dates with 2 passengers form various European airports through Brussels. Hack it a bit with LifeMiles to pay less than 60K miles and get the long-haul in business class. See this post for more.

Bottom line

I focused this post on family award travel to Europe in Summer 2023 simply because it is a popular region and time of year, but the same techniques can apply to and from other regions: I first consider where I can find availability and then I consider either what I want to see where the availability gets me or where else I can easily visit from that end point. I know that this is the polar opposite from the way that many people plan trips (typically deciding first on dates and/or destination), but this method has served me well both in terms of finding surprising destinations (I never would have visited places like Saipan or the JW Marriott Phu Quoc were it not for focusing first on availability) and now in terms of finding space for multiple passengers to fly in business class. Rather than checking places off of a bucket list, I’m using our points to travel comfortably and I’m happy to make up our bucket list as we go — and glad to bring my family along for the ride.

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