Cheap Tickets to China
 

Once upon a time if you knew the right travel agent in Chinatown you could get a reduced price consolidator ticket to China. Do those still exist, or is there any other way to get unofficial fare discounted tickets to China?

Seems like the fares are artificially high. Round-trip SFO to PVG on UA non-stop is a steep $1360 RT in Basic Economy. But the seating chart for tomorrow's flight which is 20 hours form now shows 172 available seats, so they're not selling many tickets at that price.

Good question... I checked the World Journal website and couldn't find a classifieds section (only Google inserted ads). I guess you could call one of the local travel agencies to see if consolidator fares are still a thing.

Here's the first result from a search:

https://fantatours.com/other-services/airline-tickets/

2025 is seeing a drop in prices, finally!
$1360 USA-China R/T isn't even that bad considering what it was just a few months ago.
No, it's not the $400 tickets we saw pre-Covid, but prices are finally coming down.

Also, if you can make it down to LA, LAX-PVG R/T on UA can be had for $969 in BE, and $1129 in E.

We have a long running thread on this general topic here:

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/chin...ca-europe.html

The short of it is that cheap fares to China are available from countries that have customer friendly bilateral air services agreements with China, but the US is not one of these countries at present.

Maybe it's just January, but the UA flight SFO to PVG and SEA to PVG seem to have a large number of unsold seats based on the seating chart. So perhaps demand is down as well.

Or no one is paying for seat selection if not complimentary.

As you noted in your OP, prices are quite high (e.g Instead of $400 RTs you can get from Europe, we're lucky to get below $1000). If the Chinese airlines were permitted to serve their roots daily instead 2-3 times per week, that $1000 floor would disappear in short order, and we'd start to see great fares to SE Asia again, as well.

Star Alliance has some January business class deals, & Sky Lux travel services has some global one-way & RT pricing on Asia now.

The CNY travel season has started, China media is saying that in 40 days of CNY there will be 9 billion (B) cross regional trips, includes car, bus, train & Air

Consider SFO-ICN-SFO and ICN-PVG-ICN separately. That should save you lots of $$

Replace ICN with BUD and save even more.:D

I think the internet has done for many of the Chinatown travel agents.

Even Omega Travel seems to be a shadow of it's former self, and now seems to focus only on outbound from China package tours
http://uk.omegatravel.net/
​​​​​They used to have a flight booking engine which was just as functional as Expedia and others.
​​​​​​
Ours Travel which was always more Taiwan focussed still seems to be trading but again is focussed on packages inbound to Taiwan
https://www.ourstravel.com/

While that's probably true for the most part, as long as airlines exist that hopelessly suck at doing their own distribution (or even working with OTAs), some sort of market for those guys will presumably remain. For example, if I were to find a ticket I wanted on CI or BR from the US to Asia, I would seek out a bucket shop to book it for me, regardless of how much of a discount they are able to pass on because then I wouldn't need to deal with crappy websites or calling unattended customer service phone numbers. Such agents can also be useful for RTW fares (I haven't booked one of those in a while, but I never had the patience to try to piece compliant itineraries together on my own).

It's not a question of being bad at distributing their own tickets. Just that some airlines -- in Asia particularly -- developed the practice of using bucket shops to sell deep discount fares because selling them directly would have complicated selling higher fares directly.

And of course the practice continues today with OTAs replacing bucket shops.

Will be interesting to watch over the coming days and weeks, but it seems it was a good idea to book the flight tickets to China one and a half month in advance.

I have booked BUD-XIY (T5 with the brand new unique one-stop-transfer)-PKX with China Eastern, as always with flights from BUD operated by Shanghai Airlines, for 172,50 CHF via Skyscanner and Cheaptickets.ch (TRAVIX-Group affiliate).


Now the price for the same flight has almost doubled, and we are still 3 weeks out from the day of departure.

Nice! We will want pictures! :tu: