Simon Calder: The Man Who Pays His Way

Air fares are a funny business

Pity the business traveller. Throughout the 1990s, he or she routinely subsidised those of us in the back of the plane, paying up to 20 times the economy fare in return for a degree of indulgence. They underwrote the whole show: with a full business-class cabin, airlines cared little how low the cheap seats fell. Even now, they try to take the price-insensitive travelling executive for a ride. On Air New Zealand, the business-class fare from London via Los Angeles to Auckland is £3,730. But if you travel on the same airline only as far as LA, you pay an extra 30 per cent - even though New Zealand's biggest city is more than twice as far away.

The game is now up. Air New Zealand is selling those return tickets to California for only £1,711 through Flight Centre (08708 098 909), whose commercial director is Carol Dray. She says: "It's a reflection of the corporate market not flying - the airlines are opening business-class up to leisure travellers." So the few executives who are still flying will not even reap the benefit of oceans of empty seats. Watch out for an invasion from beyond the economy-class curtain: here comes the business-class holidaymaker, or even the upgrading backpacker.

The unspoken bargain between airlines and travelling executives has been straightforward. The carriers ploughed tens of millions into ever-more comfortable cabins, while the business travellers quietly coughed up. Or, rather, their companies did. In the new, harsh economic climate, firms are reluctant to open their corporate coffers and invite the airlines to help themselves. If God had intended companies to shell out £5,000 on a London-Los Angeles return, asks the typical finance director, why did He invent video-conferencing and the internet? Airline accountants ask a different question; put politely, it is "Where the heck did those customers go?"

Reluctantly, the airlines are having to undergo some New Labour-style constitutional reform, and democratise the upper chamber of those 747s. Normal people who want a little extra comfort are being invited to pay a fraction of the normal business-class fare to fly away on holiday. The Gulf Air deal described below in Something to Declare is typical: offering holidaymakers the chance to fly to the Far East in business class and spend 10 days on the beach for less than a third of the air fare alone.

On flights to Australasia, Air New Zealand and Qantas are dabbling with a different approach; travellers have been invited to upgrade for a flat fee for individual legs of the journey. In the current Air New Zealand promotion,the rate is £450. For leisure travellers on the long haul to New Zealand, this works perfectly: you fly the daytime stretch from Heathrow to Los Angeles in economy, then upgrade for the interminable overnight to Auckland. You, like me, might think £450 to be exhorbitant for a decent kip. But I bet if an on-board auction of a business-class seat was held an hour or two into the trans-Pacific flight, the price would rise much higher.

IF YOU find yourself sitting in business class next to someone who has paid the official fare, he or she may be dismayed that you have got such a bargain. But should you find yourself sitting, in any class, next to a someone who works in travel, you can be fairly certain that you're the mug.

The travel industry looks after its own, offering promotional deals at prices that make airline accountants' eyes water. Some of the best deals are advertised on the website www.touchdown.co.uk, which is aimed at everyone with a travel industry connection from hoteliers to air-traffic controllers, plus their family and friends. This week, for example, a certain Far East airline is offering flights from Heathrow to leading destinations in Thailand for a flat £206 return.

Koh Samui? Chiang Mai? Phuket, let's go to Thailand - at those fares, it's even worth getting a job in the ever-fickle travel industry.

Students, like low-budget travel editors, have traditionally filled up the last few uncomfortable seats at the back of the very worst planes, taking inordinately complex, time-consuming routes on dodgy airlines to save a few pounds. Yet according to the world's leading youth and student travel company, undergraduates are starting to infiltrate air travel's higher echelons.

"We've introduced the option to upgrade to Premium Economy or World Traveller Plus on Virgin and BA," says Peter Grimes of STA Travel. "We've been surprised how many we've been selling." Mr Grimes concedes that many of the customers seem to be paying with their parents' credit cards, and that the hallowed senior common room of the travelling executive, the business-class cabin, is so far unscathed. But the trend among upwardly mobile students brings a new meaning to the term "top-up fees".

WHILE AIRLINES worry about getting bums on seats, the Czech Tourist Authority is more concerned about getting bums off the streets of Prague. Marc Diduca, assistant director at the London office, says his main preoccupation at the moment is large groups taking advantage of cheap flights to have weekend-long parties on the streets of the lovely capital city.

Fifteen years ago, British Airways and CSA each flew to Prague just three times weekly. Today, there are dozens of flights each week from across the UK. From many British airports, you can fly to the Czech capital more cheaply and easily than you can reach London, with no-frills flights from Bristol, East Midlands, Leeds-Bradford and Newcastle, and soon Manchester.

The majority of passengers will, no doubt, be attracted by the Gothic churches, Baroque palaces and Art Nouveau masterpieces lining Prague's cobbled streets. But some misguided folk may be enticed by the website www.prague-pissup.com. This organisation runs a five-hour pub crawl of the Czech capital for £20, including 10 free beers, which always enhance a visitor's cultural appreciation and sensitivity. Stag groups are offered a strip show ("One stripper for each eight people," promises the company, along with three free beers for your £25).

"It's horrible now on a Saturday night," says Mr Diduca, "with gangs of British lads getting drunk and smashing up hotel rooms." Some hotels are taking matters into their own hands by banning all-male groups, says Mr Diduca.

As one in 10 workers in Prague is employed in the tourist industry (and a fair few Czechs are involved in brewing, too), the authorities do not want to crack down too heavily - especially since the floods of last August hit visitor numbers. But Neil Taylor of Regent Holidays, who helped to pioneer tourism to the city in the days when you needed to overcome Kafkaesque bureaucracy to get in, says "Prague is certainly more difficult to enjoy for the serious tourist now".

For anyone tempted to travel from London to Prague in luxury, to stay aloof from those in the cheap seats, the lowest business-class fares are depressingly high: £450 on Czech Airlines, £540 on BA (including free beer).

The Czech Republic gains yet another link from Britain from 11 July. The fine city of Brno gets connected with London Stansted on Sky Europe (020-7365 0365. www.skyeurope.com). Three flights a week, for £17 each way.

Sort of. You may recall reading here that this airline has done a bit of a Ryanair by pretending to be flying to Vienna when, in fact, you end up in Bratislava in Slovakia.

Undeterred, SkyEurope is now also representing the Slovak capital as Brno, 90 miles away across the Czech border.

Oh, and those £17 introductory flights really cost £59.