The Secret to Scoring 75% Off Business Class Flights

Want to fly business class for less than the cost of coach? We expose the little-known loopholes that airlines don’t want you to know about. Plus, find out why your travel agent may be keeping these deals from you and how to work around them.

Mike Putman's Summer Sabbatical in Paris

Mike Putman: Welcome to No Tourists Allowed, a podcast where two recognized travel industry executives with a combined seventy-one years on the inside of travel and technology give up their secrets to the thing everyone wants to do. Travel better, pay less, and see more of the world. Here are your hosts, Mike Putman and James Ferrara.

Mike Putman: Hello everyone. This is Mike Putman.

James Ferrara: And I'm James Ferrara, and welcome to No Tourists Allowed. Glad to be back with you. It's been a few week respite that we've had from the podcast, but we're glad to be back and in front of you with lots of great travel information.

Mike Putman: Our summer hiatus is over, Mike. Particularly yours. You have been the intrepid traveler as usual, and you've been all over the world. I think today we have a few really great subjects to talk with our listeners about.

James Ferrara: But I want to start while it's fresh in your mind, with you and your personal excursions over the last few weeks.

Mike Putman: Yeah, so I had a really nice almost a sabbatical. I left mid-July and I took my two daughters to Paris. I have a twenty-eight-year old and a nine-year old, and we went to Paris for three days.

Mike Putman: It's really interesting because we arrived on the thirteenth. On the fourteenth is Bastille Day, so we got to see a lot of excitement and a lot of parades. There were fireworks and the city was already well underway with Olympic preparations.

Mike Putman: We stayed near the Eiffel Tower. By the way, good tip for people who are listening, there is a Renaissance Paris Nobel Tour Eiffel Hotel. It's actually not that close to the Eiffel Tower, to be fair. It's probably a mile or mile and a half, so I think they took a lot of liberty with naming that hotel.

Mike Putman: But the hotel is spectacular. It's from the eighteen hundreds, a convent that was converted, three buildings into a hotel and it is—James, you would love it. It is so impeccably designed and it really exceeded what I would have expected from a Renaissance.

Mike Putman: Even though a Renaissance is a higher end hotel, right in the middle of the courtyard there is a third party who had this gorgeous, beautiful, open-air restaurant right in the middle of the courtyard. Service was fantastic. It was really an exceptional place to stay. So, Renaissance Paris Nobel Tour Eiffel Hotel, a Marriott property.

James Ferrara: And that's on the left bank then?

Mike Putman: Yes.

James Ferrara: And did you like the experience of staying on the left bank? Is that where you usually stay when you go to Paris, or were you a right bank person?

Mike Putman: I'm a wherever I can find a good deal bank and be centrally located. I'm more price sensitive. I want a high quality place at a reasonable price, or somewhat reasonable price.

Mike Putman: That was somewhat thrown out this time because the Olympics were getting ready to start. But we just had a wonderful experience. We went out to a Michelin Star Restaurant one night and James, you will know the chef, Christian Constant.

Mike Putman: We went to his place and he came out and spoke with us and signed one of his books and gave it to us because we spent an extraordinary amount of money. That was a lot of fun.

The Advantages of European Train Travel

Mike Putman: Then from there we took the Eurostar train, which was fantastic, from Paris North. I just love riding trains. I mean that's one of my favorite things to do. And the Eurostar service was tremendous.

Mike Putman: We actually had coach tickets, not first class, and the service was excellent. Another great tip, traveling almost anywhere in the world except the United States, is to travel by train. It's a great experience.

Mike Putman: You get to see the country a little bit more than if you were just flying over it, or if you're on the highway in a car. Particularly in Western Europe and the UK, there's a great train system.

James Ferrara: Yeah, and you go center city to center city. When you fly into older cities where the airports had to be built later and built further out, like Paris or London, you've got a thirty or forty minute commute into the city typically.

James Ferrara: Whereas with the train, the train stations were built in the city center. You're from city center to city center, so you just walk out of the station and everything's there.

Mike Putman: Yeah, you're right there. So, great experience. By the way, I purchased those tickets about six months in advance and it was really inexpensive. It was like thirty-nine or forty dollars for a train ticket for a three and a half hour ride.

Mike Putman: Which is great on Eurostar, which is wonderful service. But anyway, from there, I went into Dortmund and stayed a couple of nights. The reason we went to Dortmund was Taylor Swift.

Attending the Taylor Swift Eras Tour in Germany

James Ferrara: We went to the Taylor Swift concert. Is Dortmund a suburb of somewhere or is it a city?

Mike Putman: It's a city. It has one of the most famous German soccer teams, or football teams. The city is built around the football team. It's not a terribly big city, but it is all about football there.

Mike Putman: There were no matches, but we went to the Taylor Swift concert, which I was not super excited about going to. I just wanted to be there to make sure my daughters had a good time and a safe time.

James Ferrara: You're going to get the hate mail from the Swifties now.

Mike Putman: Well, it's not that I didn't like her. She's just not my cup of tea. Anyhow, I went and I had a great time. The production—I've been to a lot of big concerts—and this trumps everything multiple times.

Mike Putman: It was well organized. They had people walking around passing out water so no one got overheated. There were just a lot of really nice touches and it was family friendly. I think her content in general is family friendly, but she does some things during her show with kids and it was really nice and just extremely well done.

Mike Putman: But it was four and a half hours. The poor girl was up there for four and a half hours and she might have gone to the dressing room for five minutes a couple of times, but she puts on quite a show.

James Ferrara: Wow. And your daughters, I'm sure, were happy with that.

Mike Putman: Crazy happy, yeah. It's a great experience. Then from there we went back to London and spent a couple of days. We went to The Anchor and Hope, which as you know is my favorite restaurant in London, and had a great experience.

Exploring the Golf Courses and Culture of Scotland

Mike Putman: Then I sent the daughters home and went up to Scotland. I had one of my friends meet me in London, then we took the train up to Edinburgh and played twelve days of golf every day. We took one day off and then played three days more and then came home.

Mike Putman: We played without a doubt some of the best golf courses in the world. We played several top one hundred golf courses: St. Andrews, Muirfield, which is extremely hard to get on, Royal Aberdeen, Cruden Bay, Nairn, and Brora.

Mike Putman: I'm a member of Crail, which is just below St. Andrews, and played a couple of rounds there. I just had a wonderful time. Excellent food and they've gotten a lot of rain in Scotland this summer, so everything was really green, not browned out like it is a lot of times.

Mike Putman: Again, the food was great. The people—one of the reasons I love Scotland so much—are just really, really friendly. They are very warm and appreciative.

James Ferrara: For me it's the food. I love all that game. You get wild fowl, you get fish, and Haggis. For those who don't know, Haggis is like the stomach lining of the sheep stuffed with minced organ meats, spices, and whatever. It sounds awful, but it's actually delicious.

Mike Putman: It is a lot like what we would call country sausage in the South. It's spicy and made up of probably terrible things, but it's pretty tasty.

Mike Putman: What I didn't know is that ninety percent of the seafood for Europe comes from Scotland. Did you know that?

James Ferrara: I didn't know it was that number, but I know Scotland has incredible seafood. I've eaten it a lot.

Mike Putman: Yeah, overall fantastic trip. It was great to get away, I got a lot of reading done, and had a lot of fun and exercise. For those of you who don't know, you don't really take carts or what they call buggies over there unless you've got a medical condition.

Mike Putman: So we were walking every day. Typically in Europe and in the UK, you walk more than you would in the US because they don't use cars as often; you use public transportation. We were walking around ten miles a day, and doing that for fifteen days, I came back feeling really good.

Combating Over-tourism with Alternative Destinations

James Ferrara: Well, Scotland isn't what I would call necessarily an exotic destination because we do tend to talk about Scotland a lot here. It's a favorite of both of ours. But it is maybe a little bit more off the beaten path than the big ten everyone talks about: Rome, London, Paris, and so on.

James Ferrara: That's an important idea, and I'd like to spend some time with you, Mike, on that. You've heard me say before that I think travel agents have a responsibility. I was recently quoted in the Wall Street Journal saying this.

James Ferrara: Travel agents have a responsibility to be sending people not just to the same thirty destinations that everybody goes to or that get these big crowds. Over-tourism is a really important idea right now in the world.

James Ferrara: It's incumbent upon us as travel professionals and travel sellers to be thinking more creatively for the benefit of the planet, certainly, so that we don't trample the planet. We spread the demand out, but we also create better experiences for our traveling customers and for our listeners here.

James Ferrara: The idea is that it just takes a little creativity and a little thought to get beyond the usual places. We live now in an age where television programs like food and travel shows, and social media with people sharing where they're traveling, give us more information than we've ever had about places in the world that may not be so commonly known.

James Ferrara: Now is the time to take advantage of all that knowledge and all of those experiences that have been shared with us. When we travel, we should go to places that are not just on that top thirty hit list.

James Ferrara: The world is full of beautiful places—thousands and thousands of interesting, fascinating, fun places. It just takes not being lazy to go and find some of these places, and it's better for everyone.

James Ferrara: I have a good example. Friends of ours just came back from a big family trip to Iceland. Iceland is certainly more popular in the last five years or so than it's ever been.

James Ferrara: There's good reason for that. It is naturally beautiful with stunning landscapes, hidden lagoons, geysers, mountains, and glaciers. They've just come back from this trip and one of them told me Iceland was their favorite part of the trip.

James Ferrara: But they went on to go on a cruise from Reykjavik to the Norwegian fjords, which is also incredibly beautiful. I've done that trip myself. They sometimes refer to that itinerary as the most beautiful cruise in the world.

James Ferrara: It goes in and out of these Norwegian fjords into small towns and big towns tucked away with waterfalls, incredible scenery, and incredible history. It's a known destination, but again, probably not on that top hit list.

James Ferrara: All the major cruise lines do these Norwegian Fjord cruises. It's important to me to think about these places in the world where we can go where we're not doing what we've been doing in Venice, for example.

James Ferrara: There's been big pushback in the headlines in Barcelona recently. Barcelona happens to be the departure port for a lot of Mediterranean cruises. So, not only is it a beautiful city in Spain with incredible architecture and great food, but it's where you have to go to get on the cruise.

James Ferrara: We're sending tons of people to Barcelona. We're sending tons of people to Venice for the same reason—it's a cruise departure port and an incredibly important center with beautiful canals.

James Ferrara: But there are so many other destinations in Italy that are equally beautiful and equally interesting. We just have to push beyond. We have to maybe subscribe to some travel bloggers on Instagram or Facebook so that it gets your juices flowing about other places you could see in the world. Do you get what I'm saying, Mike?

Mike Putman: Yeah, absolutely. There's so much content out there today that wasn't there thirty years ago. We were relying on photos and Frommer's guidebooks. Even though those guys did a good job, and Rick Steves too, there was a limitation to printing a hard book once or twice a year.

Mike Putman: Today there's so much information available. Getting beyond those primary cities to the tertiary cities, you're going to find the people are more open. You're going to find it's less crowded. You're probably going to find better food overall—maybe not the high highs, but you'll certainly find more of an authentic experience, which is part of the ethos of this podcast.

Mike Putman: Everybody needs to go to Rome to see the Colosseum and so forth. But once you get through seeing the sites and spending a day or two, take a couple of days to go up the road somewhere and get something a little more authentic.

James Ferrara: I also say challenge your travel advisor. Say, "I've been thinking about going to Rome, but give me some alternatives," or Athens. I'll give you one: go to Sicily.

James Ferrara: In Sicily, there's incredible Greek and Roman archaeology, ruins, and temples you can visit in Agrigento and Syracuse. Sicily is incredibly beautiful and much less traveled than other parts of Italy.

James Ferrara: So, challenge your travel advisor. Tell them you've heard about Paris, but ask for someplace else that might have some of the appeal of Paris without the crowds. I bet a really good travel advisor will come up with some brilliant suggestions.

Mike Putman: Absolutely. Use your travel advisor; that's the way to go, especially with the off-the-beaten-path type destinations. But there's also tons of content available online through blogs and social media. Follow some good inspirational social media influencers around travel.

Current Deals on Business Class Airfare

Mike Putman: But Mike, we've got to get people there. Getting there, if you don't have the right information or the right advisors, can be expensive. I know you've got some news about what's going on in airfares in the marketplace.

James Ferrara: Absolutely. Right now the air market is really strange. We generally talk about business class deals because that's where you can find huge value and a lot of comfort. It certainly makes the travel experience better.

James Ferrara: These are not coach prices, but I'm going to tell you about some business class deals that are out there right now. What happens is the market will go up and down, and the airlines will need to generate some cash for their quarterly financials and will drastically reduce prices.

James Ferrara: What is going on right now is really crazy prices to several Asian destinations. There are airfares in business class to Bangkok, Manila, Ho Chi Minh, and Singapore from Canada.

James Ferrara: These prices are as low as two thousand four hundred and nine dollars, including taxes. Business class all the way to Bangkok, for example, is around twenty-four or twenty-five hundred dollars. Also, these will allow a free stopover in Europe. If you route through Europe, you can actually get a free stop. You could take Turkish Airways or Air France, so you could stop over in Paris at no additional charge.

James Ferrara: All Nippon Airways is participating. If you plan this right, you could probably do round-the-world type trips. Again, you just have to get yourself to Canada. In comparison, these tickets would normally be eight, nine, or ten thousand dollars round trip. We're seeing seventy-five percent off to Asia right now in business class.

James Ferrara: To qualify, you have to have a twenty-eight day advanced purchase. You can stop over for up to 90 days in Europe. This is an unusual feature; you don't have to stay 90 days, but you can. Fares are non-refundable and penalties apply.

Mike Putman: That's Asia, but I also want to talk about 2025. For those of you who can plan in advance, the major airlines have dropped fares to Europe, either going to Europe or originating from Europe. There are deals to Dublin, Budapest, Zurich, Barcelona, and Madrid.

Mike Putman: There are airfares as low as six hundred dollars plus taxes for a Phoenix to Dublin round trip in business class on Delta. New York to Budapest is five hundred dollars business class round trip on American Airlines.

Mike Putman: You have to plan in advance and stay over a Saturday night. For this particular special, you have to book between one hundred and fifty days or ninety days in advance, depending upon the cities. Even if you're not going to one of those cities, you could fly into Dublin in business class for your eight-hour flight. Then, if you wanted to go to Dusseldorf, you just grab another ticket for the hour-and-fifteen-minute flight. These gateway cities provide significant discounts.

Mike Putman: There is one other I want to mention: Lisbon to Miami. This is for first class, by the way, not business. Some airlines have true first class, and from Lisbon to Miami round trip, it is two thousand four hundred and forty-five dollars. That ticket would normally be about fourteen thousand dollars.

James Ferrara: Some fantastic deals are going on right now. I tried to book my flight to an event we have in Sorrento, Italy, in the fall. I tried three or four months ago and the prices were outrageous, so I decided to wait it out. Now, for the last month or two, there have been price wars going on. Because I waited, I can get that flight for about half what I was being quoted earlier this year.

James Ferrara: It isn't always the right thing to do, so it is a bit of a gamble, but there are big sales everywhere. You might also see it with hotels. Even though hotels have been very full all year, their earnings reports came in a little under projection. So, we've seen hotel rates dropping in locations around the world. Talk to a good travel advisor because otherwise, there's a lot of research and time involved. If you can't afford that time, talking to a professional is a really smart thing to do. They basically work for free for you in most cases, saving you money and making sure you've got the right arrangements.

Announcing the Jamaica Resort Giveaway Winner

Mike Putman: And Mike, there's something else we need to get to. We have been talking to our audience for months about our giveaway: a four-day, three-night, all-inclusive stay at an all-inclusive resort in Montego Bay, Jamaica. It does not include airfare or personal items, but once you're at the resort, it's an all-inclusive stay.

Mike Putman: We teased that out over many weeks, and now it's time to give it away. You had your opportunity to enter by going to our website, notouristsallowed.com, by signing up for the newsletter, and by following us on Spotify or Apple. All of these things got you multiple entries.

James Ferrara: Now it's time to make the drawing out of thousands and thousands of entries. It is time to pull a name out of the hat. Nathaniel DeSantis, our producer, is here. Nathaniel is in a tropical setting himself.

Nathaniel DeSantis: I'm here, I made it. I'm in the tropical setting of Miami over in Brickell right now. Stunning views, beautiful place, fun city.

Mike Putman: Excellent. So, Nathaniel, you've got your finger on the button and we need you to pick a winner for our giveaway.

Nathaniel DeSantis: The winner is Michelle Smith-Hector.

Mike Putman: We will be sending an email out to Michelle with information on how to claim everything and the details of where you're going. Congratulations to Michelle on that.

James Ferrara: Congratulations, Michelle. We'll be in touch very soon, or maybe you'll hear the podcast before you get the email. Pick a friend to take on your trip and know that Mike and I are available if you have questions.

James Ferrara: She enters the annals of our Hall of Winners at notouristsallowed.com. Last December, we gave away a Virgin luxury cruise for two. Michelle's our new winner. Stay with us in our next season coming up in the fall, and we will have a drawing for a new travel experience then.

Mike Putman: Congratulations, Michelle. To those of you who didn't win, thank you for being part of the contest and thank you for listening to No Tourists Allowed. We really enjoy producing this content for you and hopefully you find it useful and entertaining. Please keep listening.

James Ferrara: Thank you for being here with us, guys. Thank you for joining notouristsallowed.com.