way to get fare down for EWR-BOM, such as starting from another eastern airport?
 

Hi there everyone. I spent a bit searching for this on an existing thread but did not find it so PLEASE forgive me if this is a dupe. I fly United about once a year or so but I want to purchase a r/t Biz Class to BOM. I live in DC but don't mind "repositioning" to a diff city to get a better fare. I have two questions please (oh, and I'd like to book the EWR-BOM portion on United if I can)
1. i can leave out of any city West of the Mississippi really, any city known to have slightly better fares so then I can do XXX-EWR-BOM?
2) I curr have about 40,000 miles on United. Is there any tool I can use to shave some $ off the fare (I don't care much about earning miles if that's a consideration)?
thanks for any helpful input and safe travels.

BOS starting had a nice sale earlier, but i think it is over as well

This forum is a good place to look: https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/mileage-run-deals-372/ and for business/first class: https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/premium-fare-deals-740/

What's the best price you have found so far, and how much are you looking to pay?

If award space is available on UA or its partners (or on any of AA's partners), you might explore the cost of just buying the miles you need directly from AA or UA when they run a mileage sale. ;)

You also have to factor in the obvious cost of the positioning flights and the risk that, since you will be on a separate ticket, something goes wrong on your positioning and you lose your ticket to India. Thus, you need to allow a good hunk of time such as an overnight at the positioning location, meaning hotel + food + value of your time.

The only thing you can do is to tinker with alternatives until you hit one, add in the extras from above and then calculate risk + wear & tear and figure out if it's worth it.

I took advantage of that BOS fare; ended up BOS-IAH-EWR-BOM // BOM-EWR-ORD-BOS at around 40K PQM. It's been available twice in 2018, who knows....

thanks everyone. To clarify two things
1) I'm willing to pay $ for the ticket and hoping to get it around $2500 r/t if possible
2) my ref to my miles was to inquire if there was a way to use miles to reduce the $ cost

i'm also seeing fares to DEL close to that amount so if need be, I can just suck it up and fly to DEL and then get Air India from DEL-BOM, as I don't mind being in coach for that short 2 hrs flight or so. Thanks again for the helpful replies!

I really don't think you're going to get Business from the US to India for $2,500. Just use Google Flights and put in a bunch of airports for departure and then play around with dates.

Seeing DCA/BWI-DEL from $2853 roundtrip. Requires Sun-Wed outbound and Mon-Thu return. Google flights shows limited availability on EWR-BOM non-stop at $3367 roundtrip (PXNC76S fare).

You could get it for $1800 this past winter for summer travel, my boss booked his trip, knowing that paying the $300 change fee would still be cheaper than a later fare. They were on sale for almost 3 weeks at $2200 from BOS, so <$2500 is definitely doable

YYZ business fares are often in that range. Sometimes New York too, but not as often.

BOS fare was good, it came up in Jan and Feb. Fare was good to BOM and DEL.
UA/LH/*A: BOS-BOM, ~$2,250 RT in Biz (P)

That, or a similar function with ITA Matrix that also support 30-day searches and flex length of stay. The OP could check 20 departure airports in under 3 minutes. OP won't be able to search Canadian airports in the same search as U.S. airports. Segment limits and carrier constraints work.

http://matrix.itasoftware.com/#searc...=NYCBOM-BOMNYC

Try ZFV, IAD, ORD in that order.

Sorry this is OT, but you do know that if he changes the ticket it would be $300 + fare difference, right? So in that case, he would actually be out of an additional $300 besides the later fare.