The New Source for Heavily Discounted Business Class Airfares

By virtue of its heavy marketing, mainly through the constant placement of small, inch-high, one-column ads in prestigious publications, a New York firm called Cook Travel ( www.cooktravel.net ) has attained a prominent position in the field of discounted business-class airfares. It springs to mind among a great many travelers wanting to buy a heavily-discounted business class or first class airfare. Yet when I recently called Cook to obtain a cheap business-class airfare for my own recent trip to Poland, I was disappointed with the level of service I received and the poor discount I was offered. I ended up simply going directly to an airline.

And thus it's been gratifying to see that another firm is starting to make a name for itself in supplying heavily-discounted business-class airfares to numerous international destinations, including Mexico and Canada (although it seems to specialize mainly in flights to and from European cities). The company is the Dallas-based Access Fares (tel. 888/318-3187; www.accessfares.com ), whose proprietors have been in the business of air ticket distribution for over twenty years. While Access Fares does not seem to undercut the non-stop New York-to-Paris and Washington, D.C.-to-Paris business-class fares of the unique, new Open Skies airline subsidiary of British Airways ( www.flyopenskies.com ), its prices to all other European cities and from other U.S. cities seem quite competitive. Here, apparently, is a welcome new addition to the discounting of those overly-high-priced business-class airfares.