Most business class sites quote a discount. This page quotes a method. Everything below describes how the figures on this site are produced, what they include, what moves them, and which claims we will not make about them — so you can judge a number before you act on it.
What a guide fare is
Every price on this site is a guide fare: an indicative return price for one traveller, in the cabin named, in pounds sterling, carrying the date it was last checked. It describes what that journey has been priced at, not what a specific seat costs on a specific day.
A guide fare is deliberately four things it is often mistaken for:
- Not a live booking price. Nothing on this site reads an airline seat map as you load the page. The figure was checked on a date, and that date is printed beside it.
- Not a held seat. Publishing a fare reserves nothing. Availability in a premium cabin is thin by design, and it moves.
- Not a quote. A quote is for your dates, your travellers and your routing, and it is what we give you when you ask. This is the figure that tells you whether asking is worth it.
- Not a promise of the lowest price anywhere. We can tell you what we have priced the journey at. We cannot see every seller screen, so we do not claim to beat them all.
Why the price says “from”
A single destination is not one journey. The same arrival city can be reached from several UK airports, on different airlines and different routings, and those do not cost the same. So each destination carries more than one figure, and the headline is the lowest of them.
The rule is the same on every page, without exception:
- We take the business class fares we hold for that arrival, across every UK departure airport we can price it from.
- Where an airport appears more than once, it keeps its lowest figure. One airport, one fare.
- The “from” price is the lowest surviving figure — a real price for a real departure airport, never an average and never a regional headline applied to a whole continent.
- The departure airport that produced it is named on the page, so you can see whether the cheapest start is one you would actually use.
This is why you will not find an “Asia from £x” figure here. Nineteen Asian arrivals carry nineteen fares, and the gap between the cheapest and the dearest of them is wider than most people expect.
What the date beside the fare means
Every published fare shows the date it was last checked, next to the number rather than in a footnote at the bottom of the page. That date means exactly one thing: this is what the journey was priced at on that day.
It is not a validity window, and it is not an expiry date. A fare checked recently can still be gone by the time you enquire, and a fare checked some weeks ago may be unchanged. The date is there so you can weigh the figure yourself instead of taking “current” on trust.
The fares on this site were last checked on 20 August 2026.
What moves the number
Four things, in roughly this order of force:
- Your dates. School holidays, the fortnight either side of Christmas, and the peak weeks into a given region all price differently from the same trip a month later.
- What is left in the cabin. A premium cabin is a small number of seats. As they sell, the fare on the remaining ones rises — which is why the same route can move in a week with nothing else having changed.
- The airline and the routing. A nonstop and a one-stop on the same city are different products at different prices, and the connecting option is not always the cheaper one.
- Which UK airport you leave from. This is the one travellers most often discount, and on our own figures it is worth more than most people assume.
What the UK departure airport is actually worth
We can price 86 arrivals from more than one UK airport. Across those:
- the cheapest departure is not London on 46 of them;
- London is the dearest departure on 14 of them.
Neither figure makes London a poor choice. It has the densest long-haul schedules, the widest carrier choice and most of the nonstop departures, and on a lot of trips that is worth paying for. But starting from the assumption that Heathrow is cheapest is an assumption our own figures do not support.
Here is the widest UK departure gap we currently publish in each region. Every figure is resolved from the same published fares the destination pages show, so this table changes when they do.
| Region | Arrival | Cheapest UK departure | Dearest UK departure | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Caribbean | Jamaica | London £1,640 | Birmingham (BHX) £2,896 | £1,256 |
| USA | Phoenix | Glasgow (GLA) £1,649 | Newcastle (NCL) £2,756 | £1,107 |
| Canada | Ottawa | Manchester (MAN) £1,649 | Newcastle (NCL) £2,658 | £1,009 |
| Middle East | Kuwait | London £1,344 | Glasgow (GLA) £2,159 | £815 |
| Australia and New Zealand | Sydney | London £3,130 | Newcastle (NCL) £3,940 | £810 |
| Asia | Maldives | London £1,974 | Glasgow (GLA) £2,769 | £795 |
| Thailand | Koh Samui | London £1,621 | Manchester (MAN) £2,114 | £493 |
| Africa and the Indian Ocean | Seychelles | London £1,873 | Birmingham (BHX) £2,331 | £458 |
Read that as a reason to ask for two departure airports rather than one, not as a ranking of airports. The order changes by destination: the airport at the bottom of one ladder sits at the top of another.
What we do not claim, and why
The wording on this site is constrained on purpose. These are the claims we will not make, with the reason in each case.
- “Up to x% off”
- A percentage needs a reference price to be a percentage of — the same cabin, the same dates, the same conditions, published somewhere you could check. That reference moves through the day, so any single figure would be a number we chose rather than a number you could verify. We publish the fare instead and let you compare it yourself.
- “Cheapest” or “lowest”
- That is a claim about every other seller at once. We cannot see their screens, so we cannot support it.
- “Live” prices
- Our figures are checked and dated, not streamed. Calling them live would describe something the page does not do.
- “Guaranteed”
- Nothing is held until a booking is made. A guarantee would be a promise about seats that belong to the airline.
- “Exclusive”
- Some fares genuinely are not sold on public sites. Proving which ones, on which dates, is not something we can put in front of you, so we describe what the fare is instead of who else has it.
When a figure is missing
You will find pages here where a row simply is not there — no first class fare, no departure ladder, no seat measurement on an airline page. That is deliberate. Where we do not hold something we can stand behind, the row comes out rather than being filled with a plausible estimate.
An estimate on a page is indistinguishable from a fact once it is printed. A gap is at least honest about itself, and you can ask us to close it for your specific trip.
How to check any figure on this site
Everything needed to test a number is on the page carrying it:
- the arrival airport and its code, so you know which airport the fare was priced to — this matters most where a city has more than one;
- the cabin the figure belongs to, quoted separately for business, premium economy and first rather than blended;
- the UK departure airports we can price, each with its own figure;
- the date the fare was last checked;
- the routing and airline caveats that apply, including where a nonstop operates in one direction only.
If a figure on this site does not match what you are seeing elsewhere, tell us which page and which number. Either the market has moved, or we have something to correct — and both are worth knowing.
For a figure on your own travel dates, ask for a dated quote. Start from the business class pages, the first class pages, or the destination you have in mind.