Los Angeles to London: The Cheapest Way Goes Through Casablanca

Ask a West Coast traveler how the cheap fares to Europe work and they will say Icelandair, because that is the answer everywhere else. From Los Angeles the answer is Moroccan.

The cheapest fare from LA to London connects in Africa

Carrier	Fare	Routing	Best verified seat
Royal Air Maroc	$692	via CMN	8/10
SAS	$813	via CPH	8/10
JetBlue	$898	via JFK	10/10
United	$996	nonstop	8/10
Virgin Atlantic	$1,310	nonstop	10/10
British Airways	$1,331	nonstop	10/10
American	$1,331	nonstop	10/10

Royal Air Maroc through Casablanca, $692. SAS through Copenhagen next, then JetBlue routing through its own New York hub, and only then the first nonstop — United at $996. The three remaining nonstop operators sit together near $1,331.

That is a $304 nonstop premium against the cheapest connection, and a spread of several hundred dollars between the cheapest and dearest way to make the same trip in the same week.

The Casablanca routing sounds like a trick. It is not. Royal Air Maroc carries a $0 median premium across 38 economy routes in our grid and is outright cheapest on 20 of them — almost all from Los Angeles. It is doing from the West Coast exactly what Icelandair does from the Northeast: selling spare seats on flights it operates anyway, through a hub Europeans do not connect through, to a destination it reaches on the second leg. Our connecting-hub data puts Casablanca's winning fares at a $708 median, cheaper than Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam.

Why the West Coast connector is different

Icelandair's geography works because Reykjavik sits on the great-circle route from the Northeast. From Los Angeles it does not — the polar route from LA to London passes nowhere near Iceland, and Icelandair does not sell the pair. So the low-premium connector role passes to whichever carrier has spare capacity between the West Coast and Europe and a reason to fill it, and that is Royal Air Maroc.

The lesson is the same as the Detroit and Minneapolis finding: whether a low-premium European carrier sells your airport is a commercial decision, and it decides your fare more than geography does. Los Angeles happens to have one. San Diego, 120 miles south, effectively does not, and pays for it on nearly every European city.

The nonstops behave like a protected market

Four airlines fly LA to Heathrow nonstop, which should mean competition. Three of them — Virgin Atlantic, British Airways and American — priced within a few dollars of one another near $1,331. Two of those are joint-venture partners, and the third has no incentive to undercut a route it fills anyway.

Only United broke from the pack, at $996. That is still $304 above the Moroccan connection, but it is the nonstop to price if a nonstop is what you want — and the gap between United and the other three is itself a finding about how much a joint venture is worth to the carriers inside it.

Business: ten sellers, and the cheapest is Canadian

Carrier	Fare	Routing	Best verified seat
WestJet	$5,404	via YYC	not verified
Royal Air Maroc	$5,520	via CMN	8/10
ITA Airways	$5,757	via FCO	10/10
Turkish Airlines	$6,042	via IST	8/10
JetBlue	$6,894	via JFK	10/10
United	$8,131	nonstop	8/10
SAS	$8,945	via CPH	8/10
British Airways	$12,367	nonstop	10/10
American	$12,367	nonstop	10/10
Virgin Atlantic	$12,373	nonstop	10/10

Ten airlines sold business class on this route — more than on any other we have written about — and the cheapest was WestJet, connecting through Calgary, at $5,404. Royal Air Maroc was a close second. ITA through Rome and Turkish through Istanbul both undercut every nonstop.

The three flagship nonstops sat at $12,373. That is a gap of thousands of dollars for the same night, and unlike economy it is not a gap between a recliner and a bed: Royal Air Maroc's verified business product scores 9 on our rubric, and it is the best-evidenced cabin in the dataset, scored across 46 priced business routes. The full review has the aircraft-by-aircraft detail.

British Airways at the top still varies by frame — Club Suite scores 10, old Club World 5, at the same fare. On a route where the nonstop premium runs into four figures, checking the aircraft is not optional.

What the Casablanca connection actually involves

The saving is real and so is the cost, and the cost is time. Los Angeles to Casablanca is a long overnight; Casablanca to London is a three-hour hop. The itinerary is materially longer than a nonstop and the layover is in an airport most Americans have never used — functional, not luxurious, and quiet at the hours these connections run.

Who it suits is the person for whom $304 matters more than a day, or who is flexible enough to treat the stop as a stop. Royal Air Maroc sells a stopover in Morocco on the way, which turns a routing that sounds like an inconvenience into a second destination for the price of one fare. Who it does not suit is anyone with a tight arrival, a same-day onward connection in London, or a strong preference for a single flight.

This is not a Los Angeles oddity. Cheap flights from Los Angeles found Royal Air Maroc cheapest on 14 of the 15 LAX routes it sells — Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon, Rome and London among them. The Casablanca routing is the West Coast's standing discount to southern and western Europe, and London happens to be the route where it is most surprising.

What to actually do

1. Price Royal Air Maroc before anything else. It is the West Coast's Icelandair, and almost nobody in Los Angeles knows to look.
2. If you want a nonstop, price United separately from the other three. It was $996 against a cluster near $1,331; the joint venture is not pricing to compete with it.
3. In business, the connections are not a compromise here. WestJet, Royal Air Maroc, ITA and Turkish all undercut every nonstop, and at least two of them are genuine lie-flat products.
4. Check the aircraft on British Airways. A Club Suite and a Club World seat sell for the same money on the same day.

Method

Every fare is from our carrier grid: Los Angeles to Heathrow, every airline that sold it, priced for the same fixed week of November 8–14, 2026. Single-carrier itineraries only, so a connection here is one airline's contract and not two bookings stitched together. A snapshot, refreshed monthly; the Fare Deal Checker places a fare you have found against it, and cheap flights from Los Angeles prices the whole of Europe from LAX.