The sneaky business class loophole savvy flyers are doing right now

With international travel off the cards for now, you'd be forgiven for letting this juicy flight hack slip through the cracks — some clever frequent flyers have found a devious way to score seriously cheap future first class/business class flights amid the pandemic.

Founder of Flight Hacks, Perth-based Immanuel Debeer discovered a loophole in one of the major airlines' new flexible travel policies, that can score you seats at the pointy end of the plane for a fraction of the price.

According to Debeer, aviation geeks everywhere have been taking advantage of Qatar Airways' 5000-mile radius rule, which basically entitles all customers to unlimited changes to fares with no fees when updated before December 31, 2020 — but more importantly, let's you change your destination city free of charge as long as it's within (you guessed it) 5000 miles from the original destination (in Aussie speak, that's around 8045km).

The flights enthusiast recently took to Instagram Stories to boast: "I booked Asia to Europe return in business/first for AU$741 (return!)"

How'd he do it? Well, there're a number of ways you can score a similarly cheap deal, but for Debeers, he lucked onto a flight going from Colombo (Sri Lanka) to Muscat (Oman) via Doha (Qatar) for just $741 return.

"The second leg from Doha to Muscat is classed as F (first class), this means we can later change that to first class on either the London or Frankfurt routes," he writes.

If those routes aren't available at the time he decides to change his flight — or if his preferred aircraft (i.e. one featuring first class cabins) isn't flying those services at the time — he can just switch to another European city, he says.

Many of Qatar Airways' services use planes with their famous business class Qsuites, which he points out is "arguably better than their first class product anyway".

To change your flights, you'll just need to phone the airline and request it be changed to any city within a 5000 mile radius of your final destination, which is a pretty considerable distance, as Debeer points out.

For example, in the case of Muscat, the possibilities are endless, with France, the UK and even Spain all within a 5000 mile radius, and you can easily check destination distances on Google.

But there's a catch...

It's unlikely the most in-demand services will be flogging premium class seats at such dirt-cheap prices, so it's best searching for less popular routes to find a similarly eye-popping deal.

If you're a serious bargain hunter, it's worth keeping an ear to the ground to see what other airlines are running similarly rare flexible fare deals that you might be able to leverage for a future bargain flight.