International business class flights are one of the best ways to redeem points for travel. While it certainly costs more than economy and premium economy, sometimes the gap in points is not that large. Once you have experienced how much nicer it is, with lie-flat seats, champagne, and (often) pretty good food, it can be hard to want to return to the back of the plane for a long-haul flight. However, finding award space for 4 people can be quite a challenge though, especially if you are not very flexible with your travel dates.
I’m excited about an award booking I made last week and wanted to share the full approach and tools I used to find and book these flights. For some, a few of these things might be obvious (leveraging airline alliances and transfer bonuses), but I want to go through it in full detail to help those who might be looking at making their first booking of this kind, which can be a little intimidating. For those who are finishing up their minimum spend on the recent Chase Sapphire Preferred 100k offer, this might even be an award you want to try to copy-paste for yourself.
Reason for the trip
Over our school spring break next year, we wanted to take a big trip as a graduation gift to our daughter (who will graduate high school in May 2026) and to celebrate her 18th birthday which happens to be during that same week. In 2024 we did a similar trip to Paris and Rome and the kids absolutely loved it. My daughter really wanted to return to Italy for this trip, and I wanted to make it extra special by trying to fly in business class. Our kids have flown premium economy several times but never international business class.
I previously booked our return flight for this trip from Rome to St Louis via Chicago in business class on American for just 55k Alaska miles per person and I also had a placeholder outbound flight on American premium economy booked with American miles for 40k per person flying St Louis to Philadelphia to Rome. That was a really good deal and perfectly reasonable way to get over to Europe but I continued to look for a better option because 1) I wanted to fly both ways in business class if possible, 2) I have been wanting to check out the nonstop flight from St Louis to Frankfurt, Germany on Lufthansa, and 3) we wanted to start in a different city than Rome to see more of Italy (or a different city in Europe) without backtracking. Knowing the American premium economy flight would be free to cancel, I continued my search over the past few days.
Points concepts to build this trip
I’ll explain the mechanics of how I found and booked this award space below, but first I wanted to highlight a few key themes that made it possible:
Airline Alliances
Hoping to fly on the nonstop Lufthansa flight between St Louis and Frankfurt to avoid a positioning flight, I knew I would have several options both for which points to use for the booking and for connections beyond Frankfurt. Even though I have zero Lufthansa miles, I could still fly with them booking through a partner airline. As part of Star Alliance, I could use things like United, Air Canada or Singapore Airlines miles to book this flight. Once in Frankfurt I could connect to my final destination using several different airlines such as Lufthansa, Austrian, Swiss or Turkish Airlines.
Transferrable points and transfer bonuses
The biggest reason to hold transferrable points (Chase Ultimate Rewards, Amex Membership Rewards, etc) is their flexibility. I could have used Chase, Amex, Citi, or Capital One points to book this flight, but one option gave me the best deal for this itinerary at this point in time. Using Chase points transferred to United, this flight was available for 88k points per person. I could have used Amex points transferred to Air Canada Aeroplan and done better at 70k per person. However, Chase currently has a 20% transfer bonus to Aeroplan which dropped the price to 59k Chase points per person. Compared to the 40k I had used to book my backup flight in premium economy, this was a no-brainer. To beginners, it would not be obvious to consider using Chase points, transferred to Air Canada, to fly Lufthansa, but to do this is both relatively easy and tremendously valuable. Let’s see how to do it!
Finding award space
It can be tough to find saver level award space for international business class, especially when your dates are not flexible. In our case, we wanted to leave either the first Saturday or Sunday of our spring break, so our flexibility was limited. While I found many options with 1 or 2 seats available, finding space for a family of 4 is much tougher (but not impossible!).
Where we were flexible is destination. We need to end up in Rome for our return flight, and plan to spend about 3 days there on this trip, but we would be happy to see a different country in Europe or start in another location within Italy.
The first step was to confirm there was award space on the longest flight, STL to FRA. When I first checked, there was no space and even the day we booked there was no space for 4 people on just that flight. However, when combined with a connection, flights with space started to appear. To keep track of this, I set up some alerts on pointsyeah.com.
The first alerts I set up were Explorer Alerts. These are more passive but allow for a much broader set of results. If anyone else on the platform performs a real-time search that matches these criteria, those results are cached and I will get an email. You can see below the filters I used to make sure I didn’t get results with crazy routings, super high taxes or long layovers.
The second set of alerts I set up were specific city pairs. Since you can only use four day-route combinations (more with a premium membership) I set alerts for 2 routes on 2 days. Two of our top choices for other cities to visit were Venice and Barcelona, and both are routes that Lufthansa flies from Frankfurt (more on that below), so I set them up with similar filters. Here I set them up to for only 3 passengers instead of 4. The reason for this is that if we found space on the long flight but only 2 or 3 on the connecting flight to the final destination, we may split up the group and take a later connection or pay a cheap cash fare to get to the final destination.
Last week I started receiving a few different alert emails. None of them perfectly matched what we were looking for, but it was a clue that with the right connecting flight, there was open space on the STL to FRA flight. The other fortuitous event was Chase offering a 20% bonus on transfers to Air Canada Aeroplan. Now I was pretty confident I could make it work and get the long-haul flight I wanted and a connection to a city we would enjoy visiting.
Finalizing the itinerary
The last tool I used to make our final decision was flightconnections.com. With this tool I could search for all of the nonstop routes offered by Lufthansa from Frankfurt. Besides Barcelona or Venice, we would be happy with other locations in Italy, southern Spain, Athens or Vienna. Anything on the map with a dark blue dot is a city served directly. If flying to another airlines hub city, I could also check that airlines connections with Frankfurt such as Zurich (Swiss) or Istanbul (Turkish).
Now that I knew which cities were in play, I started performing real-time searches on pointsyeah.com for the specific date we wanted to travel. The difference here was now I would expand the search to cover STL to the final destination, knowing we would connect in Frankfurt. One nice feature with pointsyeah.com is that it tracks the bank points transfer bonuses so in this case for Aeroplan awards it would show 59k with Chase points and 70k with the other currencies.
Unfortunately, our top 2 target cities of Venice and Barcelona were not available with 4 people, but we found several other options that had 4 seats available including Bari (Italy), Vienna, Munich, Milan, and our eventual choice, Naples.
The final step was to validate the route came up on aircanda.com and priced appropriately before I transferred my points from Chase to Air Canada to make the booking. With the transfer bonus, we needed 234k points for the 4 seats. While this was a lot of points to spend for a one-way trip, I am really happy with the value. Lufthansa’s current business class product is not exactly cutting edge, and I highly doubt our plane will have the new Allergris business class product installed before our trip next spring, but even a mid-tier lie-flat seat is worth it on an >8 hour flight.
In terms of value, the actual cash price of our specific routing was pretty crazy at over $12k one way. I am not considering that in my cents per point (cpp) calculation because there are other carriers who could get us there in business class for around $3200 on the same day. Using that figure, we are still getting an outstanding ~5cpp value.
We are very excited for this trip, both to visit Rome again, and to check out some new places in Italy: Naples and the birthplace of pizza, Pompeii, and the Amalfi coast.
TL;DR: Flying long-haul international business class is a great way to travel, but it can be challenging to find award space for an entire family. Using some helpful tools, and leveraging transferrable points and a current transfer bonus, we found a great option to get to Italy for spring break next year.
Always good to know about the nuts and bolts. You mention Explorer Alerts. I’m not familiar with that.
Explorer Alerts are great because you can cast a much wider net and get notified if anyone else happens to do a real time search for something that matches your criteria. The downsides are that 1) you won’t get notified if no one searches your specific criteria and 2) the deal may be gone by the time you go search to verify availability. Still, I have found these very helpful and plan to dedicate an entire post on how they work and how to set them up for maximum benefit soon.