London to Seattle, corporate policy is economy. How to get more recline: BA or Delta? Or other options?
- By
- Aparna Patel
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- 3 Aug, 2023
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I’ve done a lot of flying back and forth to Seattle from the UK for the last few years. My corporate policy is also economy. I’ve flown on Delta, BA and AA for all or parts of LON-SEA and back.
Since you’re going to be doing this a fair amount, my recommendation is to get status in one alliance and stick to it. The good thing about DL is that with status you can get free extra legroom seats, also the long haul aircraft I’ve been on have been pretty nice with seat power and decent IFE.
I chose to get status in oneworld so fly BA and AA mostly. With BA, the most important thing is to get into premium economy (WT+) somehow. From that cabin you can upgrade with avios when available to lie-flat seats in business, upgrade for cash at the airport when offered (AUP), and sometimes online (POUG). For various reasons I often change in JFK especially when I’m hunting for Tier Points. It breaks up the journey, I have lounge access and it’s good to be able to walk around and sit in a comfy chair.
Since my company allows me to buy my own tickets and expense them, I most often don’t travel in economy anyway. I usually expense the cost of a direct flight from London to Seattle (or wherever) and then pay the additional cost to get me into WT+ and upgrade to business, or buy business class directly. Usually I do this by buying a so-called ex-EU ticket, and flying from another European country. This can sometimes even be cheaper than buying economy from London.
The only option from London City airport is LCY-JFK on BA but it’s an all business class aircraft. It does a short stop in SNN for customs and immigration pre-clearance into the USA and refueling. On the way back it’s non-stop. You’d then connect to a JFK-SEA flight on AA. It’s a great flight if you can do it.
I’m with you about sleeping sitting up, I can’t do it either. If it’s a daytime flight then I can just about live with it, but flying to the US west coast is a long way and takes a long time and it’s bad enough even for a daytime flight.
Edit: A website worth looking at that claims to give you a “happiness score” comparison between airlines is routehappy.
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘