Air France KLM’s Flying Blue is the best frequent flyer program in the SkyTeam alliance, far better than Delta SkyMiles. And it just keeps getting better. A decade ago they were following Delta’s lead. Now they’re moving in the opposite direction. Lower award prices for business class.
- Flying Blue offers much better award availability for their own flights than is offered to partners. The past couple of years I’ve had no problem booking my own business class travel for myself along with my wife and daughter.
- The program has reasonable pricing, and their miles are easy to get. They partner with every U.S. bank transfer program. And they’re one of the programs which most frequently offers transfer bonuses, too.
- They’ve improved points expiration.
- In the past year they’ve re-introduced an award chart of sorts, and added free stopovers on one way awards.
- And now they’ve reduced the cost of their best awards.
East Coast coach and premium economy have gone up, West Coast down, but across the board business class awards have dropped in points price… from ~ 58,000 to 78,000 points down to 50,000 points regardless of route. It’s no longer more expensive just to fly to Paris than to other connecting destinations, either.
- Coach: 20,000 miles each way
- Premium economy: 35,000 miles each way
- Business class: 50,000 miles each way
50,000 isn’t the single cheapest deal, you’ll still get lower pricing on some routes flying Iberia business class at 34,000 miles each way if you can find availability. But this is huge relative to most programs and clearly moving in the right direction. (Go try to find business class on Delta for under 170,000 miles each way, even when those same Delta seats are available to, say, 50,000 miles via Virgin Atlantic.)
@ Gary — I never thought I would live to see this happen. Maybe even Delta can change its ways, even if it lowers their profits and makes them a truly better airline. Gasp!
I’d rather slightly higher rates and more availability. I guess we’ll see how this plays out.
@ Omar — To date, their availability has been excellent. I don’t believe that is a problem, yet.
must be an early april fools joke because i see one way business class awards pricing out at 137,500 miles.
I’m seeing the same thing as JD.
@JF and @Laurie: Depends on route and date. This is just a lowering of the floor on award pricing. AF/KL is still doing dynamic pricing, BUT there are a bunch of 50k awards out there. Just booked a pair to CPH, where DL wanted over 300k. Remember that you still need to be flexible, both with cities and dates. I’ll need to take a short positioning flight, but still a great deal.
In addition, AF is selling miles at a 100% bonus through Nov 7, so I went with that route rather than converting CC points. Effectively 1.5 cents.
I’m a little bummed about the floor on Economy and Premium Economy going up, but overall this is good news. I had been eyeing some PE flights to Split as an opportunity sometime in the next couple of years for a nice getaway. Moving from 30 to 35k isn’t that big of a deal when business class is getting a clear drop. And I assume they will still run the saver sales that will be a nice opportunity to grab last minute super cheap economy flights. Honestly, in my own searches, it just seemed like a program before where the sweet spot was in overlooked PE seats — good for a return leg from Europe. Maybe it still will be.
It depends on route and date, but I find AF has decent TATL business class saver award availability (under 100K points each way). You have to keep watching, as it changes frequently. I seem to notice that plane+train routes tend to have the lowest. Also, don’t go by the lowest point numbers for each day at the top of the results screen. It is often inaccurate and there may be lower point options in the list. And the AF and KLM sites will sometimes give different results.
A refreshing trend-breaker, and seems like it will be a net positive.
Miles (pun intended) ahead of SkyPesos.
If, like me, your itineraries and schedules are not very flexible, please don’t buy or transfer a bunch of points unless you find a great value availability first. Otherwise, you will not come out ahead.
Funny, I’m not finding any significant availability at 50k, or really any at all. Where are you seeing this?