Dieuwer

I was wondering if anyone has experience with roundtrip business class airfare BOS-EWR-TLV or EWR-TLV.
At the moment, UA seems to be priced very high at about $6K, while *A partners are around $3K. The trip would be late October.

zrs70

I have often got LAX-TLV (via EWR) on UA for around $2600 at that time of year.

Dieuwer

How far out did you buy tickets?

3Cforme

Have you checked UA's lowest published Business fare to confirm that it's 'just' a problem of availability, meaning that your proposed stay satisfies min/max and adv purchase requirements of lower UA fares?

eyuro

For some time United had a special on BOS-TLV because of the new ELAL service out of BOS. You were able to fly RT for about 1900-2100 depending on the routing. Recently I still saw fares as low as 1300 each way with that routing. EWR-TLV in P or Z fluctuates between 2600 to about 3500. They're switching to the 777-300 on the late flight after May so pricing might change.

Dieuwer

The lowest published fare seems to be P57NC1N (50 Day Advance Purchase), but is not made available. The only fare available is DLFFE (14 Day Advance Purchase with seasonal restrictions).

WineCountryUA

Then you must not be meeting the fare rules -- such as stay length, travel day of the week, ...
Need to check the fare rules to see what is blocking availability.

DA201

I fly EWR-TLV a pretty good amount and I would not be surprised if this flight is expensive. It is always expensive when I fly (both front and back of the plane) and the flight is always full.

Dieuwer

I could meet the rules, but UA RM might have decided to set P=0?

zombietooth

I flew this route twice in OCT last year and got fares from 2.6K to 3.2K. IME experience, flying on Shabbat gets you better fares and/or upgrade availability.

Try different routings to see if you are getting caught by a fare restriction e.g. MIA-EWR-TLV or CLT-EWR-TLV. For instance, I am seeing MCO-EWR-TLV for 3,442.18 (18 OCT- 26 OCT), so maybe you can position to another city and save 2K or so.

laxmillenial

Is it possible this route has higher than normal pricing because of the new equipment (777-300ER) set to enter the EWR-TLV market?

Not sure if a parallel can be made between the SFO-HKG market as the new 777-300ER enters that market soon.

docbert

September/October can be cheap, depending on when the various Jewish holidays fall. Yom Kippur (when the airport, along with basically the entire country, closes for ~36 hours) was mid-October last year, where it's late September this year. Business travel normally picks up a few weeks after that, so I'd expect October to be more expensive/busier this year than it was last.

Note that as UA has been doing a lot recently on their business fares, these are "END-ON-END NOT PERMITTED", so any positioning flights will need to be on a separate ticket, which means that at least in theory you run the risk of not being protected if you're delayed (although in practice United is pretty good about that even when on separate tickets)

Dieuwer

Yom Kippur seems to be on September 30 this year. However, right after there is something called "Sukkot" which takes place early October. Not sure if that is counted as "holidays" too. It ends mid October.

entropy

Sukkot is definitely a big holiday, lots of religious schools in the US have vacation over the sukkot period and there is lots of travel back and forth.

Dieuwer

I guess that makes J expensive too.
And most US travelers have a preference for UA? Is that why UA is double that of EU airlines?