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Flying Blue is the frequent flyer program that covers Air France & KLM and because it partners with all four of the major transferable points currencies in the United States (the currencies issued by Citi, Chase, Amex, and Capital One), it’s a program that generates quite a bit of interest.
A good loyalty program should always make it a simple as possible for members to check how easily (or not) it is for them to use their miles/points and make it just as easy to find dates when award costs are low and their miles or points can be put to great use (this is an area in which the World of Hyatt fails quite badly).
When it comes to searching for Air France KLM awards, it’s really quite simple to quickly see when saver awards are available and to find dates on which those elusive great Business Class transatlantic fares can be booked, but because Flying Blue doesn’t make it obvious how to check more than a few dates with just one search, we’ve pulled together this step-by-step guide to show how to easily view all the award availability on a single route for every date for which awards have been released.
Finding and using the Flying Blue ‘hidden’ award calendar
Step 1: Go to your local Air France website where the homepage should give you the option to “book a flight’ or “book with miles”.
Step 2: Choose the latter and then use the button provided to login to your Flying Blue account.
Once logged in, you should be redirected to the homepage where the “book with miles” option now allows you to search for award availability.
Step 3: In the flight search box, enter whatever parameters work best for you (one-way/round trip, origin, destination, etc…) but make sure you keep the travel dates clear.
This is the all-important key step as the travel dates box looks like it needs you to input your preferred travel dates, but it’s only by leaving this bit blank that you’ll be able to view all the award availability on your chosen route.
If for some reason there are dates showing in the travel dates box, use the “X” in the travel dates box or the “clear dates” option (which appears when you click on the travel dates box) to clear the field.
Step 4: Now search for flights.
What will now appear is a calendar showing the cost of the cheapest award flight available for your chosen route on every day of the current month.
At the top of the calendar, you should also be able to see the cost of the cheapest award available in the coming months.
Step 5: Clicking on an individual month will reveal the calendar for that month and that will show you the cheapest award flight available for your chosen route on every day of that month.
Step 6: Using the arrows at the top of the calendar (on either side of the months), you can move through the full year checking the cost of the cheapest awards on every day of the year for which awards have been released.
Right now, for example, we can view award availability up to the end of September 2025.
Tip for booking cheaper Business Class awards
Keep in mind that you’ll often find that the cost of non-stop awards (to/from Paris and or Amsterdam) is high, so the key to finding the better value awards is to search for availability to/from other European cities.
Yes, you’ll have to break your journey for an aircraft change in Paris or Amsterdam, but the savings can make this worthwhile.
All the calendars in this article so far have been showing the cost of one-way Business Class awards for travel between Los Angeles and Paris, and as you have probably noticed, the number of points required to book this route is almost always very high (the cheapest is 134,000 miles + taxes and surcharges for one-way travel).
If, however, we check award availability for one-way Business Class travel between Los Angeles and Madrid, for example, we’ll see that this route is bookable for under 60,000 points (+ taxes and surcharges) on a number of dates.
This works in reverse as well, so if you avoid starting your journey in Amsterdam or Paris, you may be able to find premium cabin awards that are quite economical (don’t forget to take in to account taxes and surcharges).
Here, for example, we can see that Dublin to Los Angeles can be booked for 61,000 miles (+ taxes and surcharges) on multiple dates in December, January, February, and March.
This doesn’t mean that simply by avoiding starting or ending a trip in Paris or Amsterdam you’re guaranteed to find the cheaper Business Class awards, this just means that you’re more likely to find good value Business Class awards on routes that originate/terminate elsewhere.
Bottom line
With Flying Blue miles being relatively easy to collect and with select card issuers offering bonuses for transfers to Flying Blue a few times a year, this is a program that’s worth keeping an eye on and getting to know better.
Step one to getting to know the program better is to know how to quickly and easily see how much awards cost and the dates on which the lowest cost awards can be booked, so if you didn’t know already, the information above should prove useful.
[HT: VFTW for reminding me to write this]
