Flyertalk, businessclass.{se,no,dk,co.uk}, insideflyer.de, onemileatatime.boardingarea.com etc etc.

Plus personal crawler projects and contacts with similar-minded people.

Warning: if you don't find this fun it's probably not worth the time. Expect to spend a lot of time chasing these deals.

It does seem to get harder over time, judging from my ~5 years in the game. Just a few years ago there were gaping holes in the system, allowing anyone to buy 100k miles from US Airways for $1200 and then spend them on quite on e.g. a 90k mile (or was it 110k?) First class roundtrips Europe/NA-Asia with e.g. ANA, Asiana iirc.

Thanks. It does sound easier to do as a hobby (with flexible routes and schedules) than as a business traveller.

By the way, for your situation - I am not very familiar with good routes out of Portugal/Spain - but Norwegian's normal paid premium fares out of Oslo/Stockholm/London to Oakland have been a decent fallback for me for when I can't find a decent "hacked trip". It may work for you via a connection to/from e.g. London.

Pro:

- Decent almost business class for $1400 USD roundtrip

- You can buy single trips for 50% of the roundtrip cost

Con:

- Their irregular ops handling is disastrous. They use a small fleet of 787s for transatlantic flights, with zero spare capacity, so when a plane breaks somehow you basically have to wait for them to repair it. For that reason I avoid them on trips into the US (for planned meetings there) but sometimes use them on the way back.

Thanks! My regular route is Lisbon -> Amsterdam -> San Francisco with KLM. It's 5 am flight with a 50 minute connection in AMS, but Schiphol is a wonderful airport, the dutch very helpful, and I quite like the old airplanes they use on this route. I can usually find a ticket for $700, too.