Would you pay £500 each to upgrade to business for an 8 hour flight?

[rollop]

Flying home overnight from Barbados. Working from home the day we land. An upgrade to Business would cost roughly £500 each. This is vs economy standard.

It’s a relatively short long haul flight, at 8 hours. Is it worth it? £1000 is about 15% of our take home salary for context.

I fly business for work a fair bit, but never paid for it myself.

I might pay £500 extra for a 10+ plus flight. Not sure about 8. By the time you remove take off, drinks service, landing, dinner service etc, you're only really going to be getting 5/6 hours of sleep.

I would also check which plane you'll be flying on before you pay. With the same airlines, I've had good business class and "bad" business class on older /not updated planes where it felt relatively cramped and tatty. If I'd paid for that myself as a treat, I'd be pretty disappointed.

The Barbados route hasn’t been upgraded - I flew with BA last year and they’ve already said Gatwick will be one of the last routes to be upgraded.

Thats good to know as I’m planning on going to Barbados next year and I am not as keen on the old style seats either.

In a heart beat that’s a steal!

And are you?

If you’re capable of earning that much I’m sure you can figure out such a conundrum yourself surely?

Absolutely. Great value upgrade

For £500 I would.

@MissHalloween the Heathrow flights to Barbados are on newer planes.

The old BA business class product is looking ancient and basic now compared to basically every other competitor. I’m amazed they’re still using it - and on some pretty major routes too.

Definitely 👍🏻

Personally, no. It's not long enough of a flight.

If you want to do it, check out the plane and the layout. It might not really be worth it if you are on an older, non refurbished plane.

Depends on the airline. British Airways are currently being real dicks and cutting back the Business experience. But I’d still upgrade as I hate Economy.

Yes, I'd upgrade for 15% of my take home pay

Absolutely yes I would

Assuming lie flat beds then absolutely, that's a really good price.

Thats not right, the Barbados BA route goes from Heathrow not Gatwick and has the new club suites.

Flights at the moment are to/from Heathrow.

Heaven knows. Some alternate space-time continuum.

An extra £1000 out of a joint £15k annual take home income that presumably already has had the rest of the holiday cost taken out of it? Not a chance.

Economy is the pits, if you can afford to upgrade then do it!

Oh yes

That is very cheap to upgrade if it's a true business class!
Need to know which airline to be sure - but for £500 I would

Yes. That seems reasonable. I love business class.

Your upgrades are 1/80th of your TAKE HOME PAY OF £80K, nowhere close to your gross salary. And probably a fraction of the cost of the whole trip.

Meanwhile they would be 75% of my monthly take-home. I'd upgrade in a heartbeat if 2x international flight upgrades cost less than 200quid by comparison.

Do the upgrade (and tell us plebs how wonderful it is please, we can only dream...)

500 ppl sounds like a bargain. We seriously considered upgrading for 800pp on a night flight from Doha to London a couple of years ago. Doha was the second leg after a flight from Thailand so we knew we would be shattered and aching by the time of the changeover.

Decided against in the end because we had our kids with us (17 and 8). They would have been OK together in economy but we just felt really mean to do that and 800 x 4 is a lot more than 800 x 2! They both manage to sleep like babies in economy (i can't!) so it would also have felt like business was wasted on them.

For 500 x 2, night flight, no kids and you can afford it, absolutely yes!

From Barbados - no. We've flown this route and in reality it rarely takes 8 hours. Last time it was just over 7. A glass of wine, a couple of movies, breakfast and your're home.

Definitely! I recently paid that to upgrade a 4 hour flight- so much calmer, stressless, and pleasant. and non stop champagne

Lol so many people showing their poor maths on here! Their take home is about 6,700 per month which between two is not ultra high so no I would no way be paying an upgrade fee

Hell no! I’d rather spend it on something lovely when I was there.