Be aware of Business Class fares on Air France-KLM and Delta Air Lines
Recently, I’ve been researching flights to and from the United States - attempting the get the best price on Business Class services. I settled finally on a great priced ticket which involves:
Dublin to Paris CDG in Air France Euro Business on-board the Airbus A319
Paris CDG to San Francisco in Air France Business Class on-board the Boeing 777-300ER aircraft
San Francisco to Salt Lake City in Delta First Class on a Boeing 737-800
Salt Lake City to Amsterdam on KLM in World Business Class on the Boeing 787-9
Amsterdam to Dublin on the Embraer 190 in Euro Business class
The total came to around GBP 1100 booked via Delta Air Lines - a great price for business class to the West Coast of the USA - but it took quite a fair bit of effort.
Prices came up great when I was looking on both the Air France and KLM websites - as you’ll see below. Clearly it states ‘Business Standard’ - which you would assume is the class all the way.
The outbound was perfectly fine - all in Business Class.
The return flight looked more or less the same - Business Standard fare, you would assume it is Business all the way.
Go a bit deeper into flight details and you’ll notice that it’s not quite accurate. Even though the international sector from New York-JFK to Dublin was in Business Class, the San Francisco to New York-JFK sector was in Economy Class - despite being advertised as a Business fare.
Why is this happening?
It comes down to the way ‘Business Class’ flights are marketed in the United States where they are branded as First Class instead. Internationally First Class is always the cabin above Business so one can only assume that the Air France-KLM systems interpret this the same way that the domestic sector must be in the same or next lower class (Economy). Although the cost of the flight is still reasonable, when compared to a direct Economy ticket from London, if you went for the itinerary above you would be spending just under fifty percent of your flight time in Economy - which is certainly not what you would expect. Even I, somebody who is quite used to booking flights, almost went ahead and booked it - I’m quite glad I didn’t!
How can you get around this?
It’s not clear how you can avoid this happening on domestic sectors serviced by Delta and ticketed by Air France KLM. The first thing you can do is to see if there is an alternative routing which either avoids the domestic connection, with a routing through Amsterdam or Paris, or try to see if any of the domestic flights appear in First. I booked my flights via Delta which meant that the whole itinerary would be in Business or First Class - but the issues didn’t end there.
I wanted to change my flight from San Francisco to Salt Lake City to be earlier so I didn’t have a short 45 minute connection - however when the agent rebooked the flight this got put into Economy because ‘Business wasn’t available in the US’. I was able to get this put back into First Class by contacting Delta via Live Chat again - but it shouldn’t have happened. In short, all I can say to people booking these great fares is to always double check before clicking pay so you do not fall for this problem.
