Swiss offering cheap Business upgrades in Europe
 

I received an email from Swiss with information about upgrading from economy for about €75/ segment.

It is selected destinations and only when flying on LX metal. The difference places the Business Saver fair at about the same as a normal economy ticket. You can find the information here.

My understanding is, that it's sort of like a standby gamble, where you pay for an upgrade that might not be there, but you get 2000 M&M points for the J class booking. Selected SWISS Flights in Europe have blue-colored prices in the SWISS.COM

I was just playing around with LHR-IST, and found some dates primo Sep. where the regular J fare was lower than the M fare.

When I tried to repeat the search, I got the old booking engine. I think that there are some problems with the website. There might be some good regular business deals there.

AMS-IST in "upgraded" J costs €402.35, where the lowest biz ticket on Kayak is €840 for sep 5 - sep 12.

is this only interesting for M&M members?



Business benefits at a glance
* More award and status miles for Miles & More members :confused:

SAS Eurobonus and BMI Diamond members get x2 miles/points for J class. The ticket also includes lounge access, all for the same price as a ticket that only gives x1 miles and points.

Considering the swiss business weekend specials, just an upgrade for 75 EUR per segment seems to be expensive. You can get a whole 4 segment C ticket for less sometimes.

Might not be worth it... last Swiss flight I was on there was basically no difference between the seats or service in the two classes... and both were mostly empty.

it is 75 EUR extra per DIRECTION and not per segment. for M&M, it means 8000 miles instead of 1000 for a flight via ZRH, free middle seat in biz (ok, it is like in Y if it is rather empty), warm meal on many flights, drinks, lounge access, security fast track in some airport... it looks interesting.

Nice idea, this seams to be a permanent feature! Some more restrictions though:

THIS PRODUCT IS *NOT* VALID FOR ALL TRAVEL CONTAINING
THE FOLLOWING ROUTES:
---------------------------------------------------------
ARN-ZRH V.V. / ATH-GVA V.V. / ATH-ZRH V.V. / BEG-ZRH V.V.
BRU-BSL V.V. / BRU-ZRH V.V. / DME-GVA V.V. / DME-ZRH V.V.
DUB-ZRH V.V. / DUS-ZRH V.V. / FRA-ZRH V.V. / LCY-GVA V.V.
LCY-ZRH V.V. / LHR-ZRH V.V. / LUG-ZRH V.V. / LUX-ZRH V.V.
MUC-ZRH V.V. / NUE-ZRH V.V. / OTP-ZRH V.V. / STR-ZRH V.V.
WAW-ZRH V.V.
---------------------------------------------------------
ADDITIONALLY ITS *NOT* VALID FROM THE FOLLOWING POINT OF
DEPARTURE (FIRST OUTBOUND):
---------------------------------------------------------
FROM RUSSIA TO EU / CH
FROM GERMANY TO EU / CH / BSL
FROM AUSTRIA TO EU / CH / BSL
FROM LCY TO BSL / EU
---------------------------------------------------------
FOR THESE DESTINATIONS EITHER J-CL IS CLOSED OR A JSWISS
FARE IS STILL PUBLISHED.

We are here to get the miles not enjoying LX C in the first place ;)

at least last January, they served a nice meal in intra-European J class, as well as champagne (from a decent-sized bottle, not those small single serving thingies)

What are the mile accumulation possibilities for other *A FF programs?

I know that on BD DC it earns 200% for C, so the minimum of 600 miles.

So 1200 per segment or 2400 destination miles if you hit 55K already. Not too shabby but there are better things in this world...