Air France KLM is offering great award space between the U.S. and Europe for this coming summer. There are plenty of routes and dates where you can book business class awards for at least four passengers.
Often Air France and KLM awards can be booked using their own Flying Blue miles – easy to get, they’re a transfer partner of American Express, Chase, Citibank, and Capital One – however in this case most flights appear even to be bookable using Delta SkyMiles as well (Delta is an American Express transfer).
The best availability appears to be between Washington Dulles and Europe and also Austin and Europe, though those aren’t the only routes that are available.
Washington Dulles – Paris on Air France for four passengers in business class is wide open in July for outbounds, and both directions in August. You’ll want to check which flight you’re finding availability on, the Boeing 777 offers perhaps the best business class between the U.S. and Europe while the Airbus A380 offers one of the worst (angled seats).
Washington Dulles – Amsterdam on KLM for four passengers in business class is wide open in July for outbounds, and both directions in August.
Here’s a search for 4 business class awards, Dulles – Paris in August, on the Flying Blue website. You’ll see that between Air France and KLM flights there’s something open at the saver level every single day.
The new Austin – Amsterdam flight on KLM doesn’t operate daily, but most days that it’s running in July and August there are four business class award seats available.
There’s also occasional availability Seattle, Chicago, and San Francisco – Paris for four. And wherever you want to go in Europe you can likely find onward connecting space beyond Paris or Amsterdam.
Cost:
- Delta SkyMiles: generally charges 75,000 miles each way between the U.S. and Europe on partners though sometimes price is higher. Taxes run $5.60 for the outbound, a little over $50 roundtrip. However if you book one ways then the trip originating in Europe will incur fuel surcharges.
- Air France-KLM Flying Blue: varies prices by destination, roughly 53,000 – 68,000 miles each way plus taxes and fees a bit over $200 each way.
(HT: Thrifty Traveler)
@ Gary — Nice. Thanks!
Anyone notice UA/AA/and DL booking systems are f’d up.
Does this presage any broader improvement in Delta SkyMiles TATL availability on Air France metal? For years it seems mostly blocked and I get conflicting answers is it Delta or Air France doing the blocking.
“Anyone notice UA/AA/and DL booking systems are f’d up.”
Yep. i went to google news to see any hacking or whatever. I found out after i was looking for LAX-JFK flight and even though kayak was showing, actual AA/DL/Alaska websites were busted.
Agree there is a fair amount of availability for DL metal in D1, this has been going on for a few months. Dont forget VS Flying club miles as currency for DL metal flights. I was able to get a few SEA-CDG flights on the DL A330 in D1 for 50k VS miles each during the summer. Ex-SEA is also showing good availability to PVG for 60k VS miles on the A330-900 neo, 5 of us flew that in late November on VS awards.
@Stefan Krasowski – for the most part it hasn’t been Delta doing the blocking, since other partners generally couldn’t access seats that were offered generously to Flying Blue members either, though delta’s best access to air france inventory has long been booking far out rather than close-in. unclear whether this is indicative of anything at all. one can hope!
The government-enabled antitrust behavior that allows DL and AF-KL to collude and revenue-split on TATL flights of sort means that DL and AF-KL are in mutual desire to collude against their customers and cap the ability of customers to use DL or AF-KL miles for trips that escape both AF-KL fuel surcharges and DL’s ridiculously high SkyMiles award ticket pricing.
DL and AF-KL loyalty program customers redeeming miles for US-EU and EU-US trips would be so much better off if governments didn’t give these TATL-flying giant airlines the waivers and favors that allow them to collude against consumers traveling between the US and Europe. And this game being played by DL and AF-KL to maximize the airlines’ combined revenue from mileage program use for award travel is why DL SkyMiles customers were throttled jointly by DL and AF-KL when it comes to wanting to redeem DL miles for TATL travel.
Much the same thing has been done by AA and BA even as it works out for these colluding airlines in a slightly different way to rip of their US-based loyalty program customers.
For the most part, this limitation in availability using non-AF-KL miles for TATL travel is the joint product of DL and AF-KL. It wouldn’t be this bad for DL and other Skyteam program customers if the relevant governments actually did ban collusion by these behemoth airlines instead of given them so many governmental waivers and favors of a sort that appease the libertarian apologists at the expense of consumers in the main.