How you can earn a pile of air miles with cheap business class flights to Australia from India and Sri Lanka

A few weeks ago, we posted details of some great business class fares from India to Australia with Malaysia Airlines.

It’s worth a reminder about this, as prices in this ballpark are available pretty consistently, and its a fast-track route to airline status if you credit these flights to a oneworld carrier such as British Airways.

The India-Australia offers

To recap, Malaysia Airlines regularly sells cheap roundtrip business class flights between India and Australia. Prices can be as low as INR 86,000.

The cheapest fares are usually to Perth, but a quirk of this ticket is that you actually force a routing to Perth via Sydney or Melbourne – great if you want to collect a truckload of air miles and maximise the number of sectors with long-haul aircraft (and those all-important flat-bed seats).

You can find such fares on ITA Matrix, filling in the ‘routing’ fields with kul, syd and syd, kul as I have done, if you want to fly via Kuala Lumpur and Sydney to maximise your tier points:

That search should provide an itinerary like the one below, which would give a blue (or entry level) BA card holder a total of 640 tier points – enough to achieve silver status (which requires 600 tier points) from one trip:

That silver card opens up year-round benefits, including priority check in, increased luggage allowance, bonus Avios air miles and access to business class lounges for you and a guest.

You’ll earn even more tier points if you start from Mumbai or Delhi, rather than Cochin.

In you do that, each leg would earn 140 tier points, giving 840 tier points in total (which is over half way to gold, where the perks get even better and you can access the more exclusive first class lounges).

Cheap deals from Sri Lanka too

It isn’t just India that gets lucky – there are some good deals to be had from Sri Lanka to Australia, too.

You can expect to pay around INR 100,000 (USD 1,300) for a roundtrip ticket from Colombo to Perth, travelling SriLankan to Singapore, and onwards to Perth with Qantas.

As you can see, the SriLankan legs to Singapore are sometimes operated by short-haul A320 aircraft (which don’t have flat beds), though the airline also flies its A330s (which do have flat beds) to south east Asia, so you may get lucky.

The itinerary above will earn you a total of 360 tier points – over half way to a British Airways silver card.

Summing up

Frequent flyers in the subcontinent have a great way to fast-track themselves to airline status with oneworld, by taking advantage of these fantastic business class fares to Australia.

With departures from a range of Indian cities, as well as Sri Lanka, it shouldn’t be too difficult to find an itinerary that works for you.

Anyone tempted to book one of these fares – perhaps for next year?