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One of the great things about having people interested and engaged in the miles and points world is that we have eyes everywhere. Where one of us may miss something that an airline or hotel chain has said, posted or done someone else will see it and flag it up.
TFM reader Alex left a comment on my post about how Flying Blue status will be earned from 1 April 2018 saying that Flying Blue had already changed one of the details of the new program before it has even launched.
Specifically this is what Alex wrote:
It seems Flying Blue is changing its new program already: The conversion rate for status-miles on 31 March 2018 first announced – and in this article – was 1000 level miles = 5 XP. The Flying blue website now says 1000 level miles = 4 XP. Not a good news if confirmed!
The first thing I did was to head on over to the new Flying Blue info page to see for myself, but all seemed in order:
The page I was looking at still showed that, come 31 March 2018, Level Miles would be converted to Experience Points (XP) at a ratio of 1,000 : 5
That’s how it has been since the new program was announced so I wondered what Alex was talking about….so I asked him.
It turns out that Alex is now also seeing the same page that I am because he’s no longer in France but, when he was over in France, he was seeing something different.
Specifically this is what he was seeing:
The French version of the new Flying Blue information site is showing the conversion ratio for Level Miles to XP as 1,000 : 4
If you want to see the same thing wherever you are in the world you can use this URL:
https://explorefurther.flyingblue.com/?FB_Country=FR&FB_Language=EN
- Copy and paste the URL into your browser (and go to the page)
- Click on “Explore Now”
- Click on “Experience and Explore”
- Click on “Read More”
- Scroll down the page until you see the paragraph discussing the conversion ratios
This clearly isn’t a typo as all the example calculations on the page are using the 1,000 : 4 ratio so I’m not really sure what’s going on.
As Alex has pointed out you can substitute the “FR” in that URL for US, GB, DK, AU etc…. to see the same page as viewed in other counties and all of those show the conversion ratio as we know it (1,000 : 5)….but the French site is an anomaly.
I’ve sent a message to the Air France Twitter team to see if I can elicit an explanation and I’ll post any updates as soon as I get them.
Thoughts
I have to believe that this is either a mistake (and not something that Flying Blue is doing deliberately to its members in France) or there’s a rule somewhere (specific to Flying Blue members based in France) that I don’t know about.
I’ve had a quick look on FlyerTalk and I can’t find any mention of this anomaly (which in itself is strange and actually makes me feel a little better – FlyerTalkers would be up in arms by now if there was an obvious rip-off in the works) but then the search function on FT isn’t the best so I may be missing something obvious.
Anyone else seeing this? Anyone have any ideas what may be going on?
[…] week I wrote about something which appeared to be an anomaly with the way some Flying Blue members will see their Level Miles converted to Experience Points […]