FARE DEAL: EY Business Class Beijing to São Paulo, Brazil

Etihad is currently offering amazing business class fares at ~CN¥15,000 (tax incl.) between Beijing and São Paulo with a stopover in Abu Dhabi. I have never seen such good fares from Asia to South America: a friend’s recent flight via LAX to Peru in Economy class was easily more expensive than this.

Valid for travel on/after 16 January 2015
Travel to be completed by 30 June 2015
Blackout dates (ie CNY holidays): 14 – 22 February 2014 (outbound) & 24 – 1 March 2014 (inbound)
Book by 31 October 2014

Flights

If you plan to take advantage of the CNY public holidays in Hong Kong (19-21 February 2014), you can book the following flights (ie just outside the blackout dates) and overall connection times are not bad at all:

That means taking 4.5 days of leave for a total of 9 days in Brazil / South America! Also, getting to Beijing is easy with so many flights: you can easily take the 7pm Dragonair departure out of Hong Kong and the 12:30pm return flight from Beijing with plenty of time to spare.

What to expect onboard

Etihad’s business class is called Pearl business class (First is called Diamond, Economy is Coral…) and features fully flat beds.

One of my all time favourite travel bloggers out there is ‘Lucky’, and his blog is called One Mile at a Time (in case you haven’t heard of it already). He has travelled on Etihad extensively and with his kind permission, here are some pictures (here is a link to a recent trip report by Lucky).

In my opinion, unlike CX’s dormitory style business class where for the most part the seats are homogenous, not all seats are equal on Etihad. You’ll see in the first picture below, seat 6K on the A330-300 is actually closer to the window side with a nice mini-wall between the seat and the aisle.

As the configuration is staggered, for every other ‘window’ seat, the console is by the window and the seat is right on the aisle. As a window person, I’d definitely pick the real window seats for a more privacy. There are also middle seats which are next to each other (4th picture below) which may be good for pairs but those seats I feel are a bit claustrophobic.