I have an interesting problem I’m trying to solve

So I’m going to visit a customer in a couple weeks, London to New York. I need to get SQD so I’m trying to find a way to maximize travel on 014 tickets.

This customer requires me to book through an internal travel desk; no option to do my own booking. So it’s not really practical to do any crazy routing / fare hacks.

I can request any ticket as long as it’s within USD$300 of the cheapest non-stop J ticket in the same time window.

So, for example, on my sample dates if I wanted to fly at 9am, I can take any of the nonstop options because they’re all around the same price - USD$9,400. But if I wanted to fly at noon, I’d be required to take JetBlue which is USD$6,400 compared to the others at $9k+.

Now, of course, Air Canada has priced itself out of the running at $11-14k for a connecting flight…

So far it feels like my options are:

• Find an obscure flight time where AC is the only option
• Find a different origin airport where AC connecting flights are priced competitively and book my own positioning flight

Has anybody here struggled with a similar dilemma? I’m really curious what sort of malicious compliance hacks the FT community have come up for this sort of thing.