And predictably, today is 50% (and still 20% in Business). They must have the same student back for work experience a year on.

I booked a Business Class return LHR-ATH-SKG on Friday for travel in February. It was still 4x the cost of Y with the larger discount, but because of the connection in ATH it books into the higher Business category, so I get just under 10k status miles plus the Gold bonus. It was much cheaper and more time efficient to requalify that way than find a longhaul to the States in J, where SK were the cheapest but carrying the not inconsiderable risk they'll leave Star before the flight date (plus they're now charging for seat selection).

 

Plus a good dinner in Saloniki!

 

I've booked quite a few international segments over the weekend. In Eco Flex when the difference with business is large, or in Business Flex when prices are relatively close (<100 euro per segment difference), or, when no upgrade space was available. Upgraded the first 3 of the Eco segments using coupons (And will keep one coupon for 'last minute travel').

My prediction is that this this year is going to be an extension of last, possibly even more extreme, in terms of pricing. Where in the past I'd typically book a month or so prior to travel I've realised that nowadays this will get you 200+ euro Economy fares. So this time I've booked flexible fares at discount that allow rebooking, for best-guess and a few speculative dates. Business Flex can always be rebooked or refunded so there really is not much to lose with those (Well, 23 euro callcenter fee I guess). However hopefully, this will allow to use the majority of these discounted fares - saving some money in the progress. Or flying business for the price of Economy.

The below shows a pretty clear picture - and is fairly representative of business fares this specific route I believe. While last year a lot of my travel turned out to be on SkyTeam, that's not going to be the case this year it looks like.

 

How on earth did Aegean manage to price the full business class fare lower than the "basic" one at the same booking class?

 

There's a slightly larger than 20% reduction on full fare, and slightly less than 20% on basic fare, but not enough to explain the rather large difference. I'm not complaining too loudly .

It was also cheaper, by �80 total, to pay in Euros rather than Pounds Sterling. I've not looked as to whether this is true for flights from all non-Eurozone countries.

 

I think EUR is always the base currency and all other currencies have a significant markup

 

Most airlines use the IATA day rate to convert. I can't particularly recall if this is something I've tried before, but I only noticed because I was playing around with dates on the app and website around the same time. I thought A3 also used IATA conversion rates (whenever I've paid an upgraded voucher cost for UK APD, it's been in Euros at the right conversion), so maybe this is a recent change. We're talking about 5.5% difference, much more than any credit card would impose.

 

I am not sure since how long it's like that, but I am pretty confident it's at least since covid, but probably longer. Any currency has a significant markup to EUR. It seems POS is always Greece and some (external?) service is used for conversion? I am aware that most other airlines use the departure airport country as POS and the POS' currency. Before often no currency selection was offered on their websites, but nowadays I have also seen offerings for other currencies with markup.