Business Class Around the World: 9 Star Alliance Routings From Paris for Less than €3,000

Departing from Paris, there are currently all sorts of exciting options for “Round the World” tickets in Star Alliance business class. There are innumerable variants. Some routings can be booked, some can’t. All connections have a stay in Auckland in common.

The best options appear to be found in late 2022 and mid-2023. Availabilities get better the further into the future you decide to book. We found the cheapest variant that we can book directly with the airlines for €2,862. There seem to be significantly more bookable combinations via OTAs.

You can book some of the flights directly with United, Lufthansa or Swiss. If that doesn’t work, we recommend booking with Expedia. You can also use the following form to access the multi-stop search on Expedia. You can find flight dates between November 2022 and June 2023. Availability gets increasingly better towards the end of the travel period.

Basically, as mentioned above, countless options are possible. You can start east or west, incorporating destinations like Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Auckland, Sydney, Bangkok, Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong, and more. However, the start and destination must be in France, otherwise, the prices cannot be achieved.

You can fly with Air New Zealand, Lufthansa, Eurowings Discover, Swiss, Singapore Airlines, Air Canada or United.

Unfortunately, Air New Zealand’s business class isn’t the most modern, and their new business class won’t be implemented by 2024. Long-haul options with ANA and/or Singapore Airlines are therefore more attractive.

Additional Routings

There are much more possible routings than the example above. In principle, you can select one stop of each color and build your own trip around the globe. Limits are that it has to start in France (blue) and Auckland has to be part of the journey:

Example Routings

Of course, many more connections are possible than in our example above. Below are a few more examples. Where possible, we have linked United (via Google Flights) or Expedia for booking.

• Eastbound:
  • Paris – Singapore – Auckland – Toronto – Paris for €2.914
  • Paris – Bangkok – Auckland – Los Angeles – Paris for €3.248¹
  • Paris – Osaka | Tokyo – Auckland – San Francisco | New York – Paris for €3.248¹
• Westbound:
  • Paris – Chicago | San Francisco – Auckland – Tokyo – Paris for €2.821
  • Paris – San Francisco – Auckland – Tokyo – Paris for €2.821
  • Paris – San Francisco – Auckland – Seoul – Paris for €2.838
  • Paris – San Francisco – Auckland – Singapore – Paris for €2.849
  • Paris – Austin | San Francisco – Auckland – Tokyo for €2.892¹
  • Paris – Vancouver – Auckland – Singapore – Paris for €2.906
  • Paris – Mexico City – Auckland – Tokyo – Toulouse for €2.955
  • Paris – Cancún – Auckland – Singapore – Paris for €2.943
  • Paris – San José (Costa Rica) – Auckland – Tokyo – Paris for €3.277
  • Paris – New York – Auckland | Sydney – Singapore – Paris for €3.352

The vertical bar | stands for a surface sector. You then have to take care of the transportation yourself from e.g. Chicago to New York. You can remain flexible in your planning and can also take the Amtrak, for example.

1 – If you follow this link, you Google displays tickets offered by travelstart or similar OTAs. It should also be possible to get these prices directly from the airline (using their hotline) or via good old fashioned offline travel agencies. This can save you a lot of trouble and frustration when rebooking.

Search & Book

The fare rules do not state an expiration date. The minimum stay requirement is 10 days, and you can be on the road for a maximum of 12 months.

You can find suitable dates with the help of Google Flights (instructions). Alternatively, the matrix is also available. Have patience: as already mentioned at the beginning, many things cannot be booked or the prices jump around. In any case, there are quite a few options.

You can book some of the flights directly with United, Lufthansa or Swiss. If that doesn’t work, we recommend booking with Expedia. You can also use the following form to access the multi-stop search on Expedia.

Finding Availabilities

The best tool to find flights that can be build into your around-the-world ticket is Google Flights. However, you may run into some issues along the way. Here is an overview of four common problems while searching for these flights – along with four solutions that will help you overcome them.

• Problem: After selecting a couple of segments, the cheap price is still available, but it disappears after adding more segments.
  • Solution: Just finish assembling your journey. In some cases, the final price will be around €3,000, even if it changed throughout the search process.
• Problem: I don’t find any flights with a Star Alliance partner. Google only suggests Air France flights.
  • Solution: Set a filter for airlines, so only Star Alliance members or specific airlines like Lufthansa are displayed.
• Problem: My preferred return flight like Seoul – Munich – Paris isn’t offered, only Seoul – Munich – Frankfurt – Paris.
  • Solution: Split your last flights up into smaller segments. Don’t search for Seoul – Paris but for Seoul – Munich in leg 4 and Munich – Paris in leg 5.
• Problem: I found a fitting itinerary on Google Flights at a desirable price – but can’t book it anywhere.
  • Solution: This is trickier than the others. For some combinations, there simply aren’t OTAs who sell them. You can only call the airlines and ask to put that itinerary together and hope the price turns out to be correct. Also, Google Flights is not without failures, the site may display wrong prices
    You can double-check if that’s the case by entering your itinerary into the ITA Matrix or check Expertflyer – though the latter one requires a subscription.

Sadly, the Matrix deals with limited computing capacity. We recommend using as many filters as possible to narrow down potential results. An optimized matrix search looks like this:

You can find a tutorial for the program here.

Mileage

The booking class is usually P but varies depending on the operating airline. With Air New Zealand, for example, you end up in booking class J.

For the example routing ZRH - CDG - LAX - SFO - AKL - TYO - ZRH - CDG you should receive the following miles when booking directly with United:

Of course, we cannot cover all examples with the list. Therefore, you will find our mileage calculator below, which you can use to calculate credit for different routings:

Source: Premium-Flights

Cover Picture: Photo by NASA on Unsplash