How to Find Last-Minute Business Class Award Availability to Europe

Everybody knows that booking free award travel in business class requires you to book months in advance. Conventional thinking says that airlines only make a small number of business class seats available for free award travel using points and miles.

For the most part that can be true. Airlines want to keep as many of these expensive business class seats available as possible for their lucrative last-minute business travelers who pay top dollar.

But there comes a point as the flight date approaches when airlines start to calculate that many of these seats will not be sold to revenue passengers and open them up for award redemptions.

Airlines Can’t Always Sell All Of Their Business Class Seats

Many flights to Europe from the U.S. are on wide-body aircraft. The largest of these like the Boeing 747-800 and Airbus A380 have substantial business class sections.

On the A380, the biggest commercial aircraft in the sky, some airlines will equip their planes with as many as 78 business class seats. Similarly, on the 747-800 Airlines have equipped these aircraft with as many as 80 business class seats. Other slightly smaller wide-body jets are also equipped with a substantial business class section.

This means that as hard as they try to sell every single one of those very expensive business class seats between the United States and Europe, they are often unsuccessful. This means there will often be last-minute award availability for you.

Last Minute Award Availability

Days before a flight, up until the actual departure, many airlines make these business class seats available for free awards redemptions. And since there is often availability on a variety of airlines, it is likely that whatever airline loyalty currency you have, there will be a way to cash those miles in for one of these flights.

For me my favorite way to check for this availability is by using the United Airlines flight search engine. Plug in your European destination and the engine will bring up a variety of flights from a variety of airlines.

United offers business class on its own flights for 60,000 miles and business class on partner airlines like Lufthansa, Swiss and Austrian for 70,000 miles. You’ll often see this availability for departures for the current day as well as a few days into the future.

Using the United search engine not only allows you to use United Miles to pay for the flight, you can also use Chase Ultimate Rewards points, transfer them to United and pay for the flight. But as mentioned before, you’ll find many airlines offering this last-minute availability.

If you’re a last-minute traveler, this is great news. But many people are not prepared to leave for Europe in the next couple of days. In that case, you can try plan B.

Plan “B”

The other way to secure one of these last-minute business class flights is to book your ticket in economy class using miles as early as you know your travel plans. Then upgrade your ticket at the last minute when the availability opens up.

You would simply pay the difference in miles. United charges a close-in booking fee for award tickets booked within 21 days of your flight, but this fee is not charged by every airline. I’d also recommend calling a rep for help with this change, rather than attempting online.

Obviously, there is no guarantee that there will be availability, but your chances are pretty good.

I would recommend that you go onto your preferred airline search engine and just type in various destinations in Europe. Look for business class and check the availability for business class seats for the day you’re checking and the next few days in the future.

Repeat this process for several days and you’ll start to see the rhythm of seat availability for your destination.

For example, you’ll start to see what days of the week seem to have the most availability and how soon these flights are available.

Conclusion

If you’re at all like me, a free business class flight to Europe sets the tone for a great trip. Instead of arriving worn out, jet lagged and in need of a day to recover, I arrive rested, well fed and ready to start my vacation as soon as I land.

Follow these tips above and you’ll be able to book your own last-minute business class ticket to Europe using miles.