Air France-KLM Flying Blue Adds Choice Benefits, Offering Bonus Miles & Status

Well done, FlyingBlue. While seemingly every program is devaluing and screwing over loyal customers, it's nice, for once, to see a program actually try to reward them instead.

AF/KL remains some of my personal favorites (incredible food on AF; and, maybe I need to book some more flights with KL; get some more delft blue houses).

@Ben- I assume that this applies to also earning XPs instead of UXP?

This is a positive development for sure and offers incentives to go past 300XP even when 900XP seems unattainable, but is it me or are those benefits really poor? I'm not sure that someone who hits 450XP a year will get excited by an extra 15k miles... A real incentive would have been upgrade vouchers introduced from 450XP and not 750, but I don't know. I've been platinum for a few years and as much as I like the idea of choice benefits, those won't motivate me to go past 300XP.

How does the overdraft work in practice? I realize there's already an overdraft for Plat / Ultimate so folks may have experience. It says on the benefits table that you just repay it with future earned miles - but what if you overdraft and just never earn more miles? Do they send you a bill? In other words, if they're not going to chase the overdraft - aren't you better off taking the additional 20k overdraft versus 15k miles and just living in the overdraft?

From the email i received i had concluded that it should also be possible to earn these bonusses not from uxp but also from just xp. I will wait and see if this is correct, but 450 uxp is not very attractive imo.

Calling their program "interesting" sounds to me like a polite code word for something else.

There is a big fundamental issue with Flying Blue XO though, since its latest change on how surplus is treated, officially you can only make 600 usable XP that counts towards keeping your status (-300 XP) as well as another 300 XP surplus. Anything above 600 XP is therefore lost and forfeited and does nothing for you (especially when your already Platinum as one of the only goal really is your status counting towards your Platinum for Life years which is 10 years consecutively) u can have 900 or even a 1000 XP but only 600 are kept for maintaining and 1 year of surplus in keeping platinum while rest is gone. Unlike before, make 3000 XP and your basically set Platinum for Life

Ben,

I'm delighted you find this upgrade idea interesting. Six months ago, I proposed this idea to Air France management. I also suggested another idea, not advantageous for customers, but profitable for the company. This involved selling upgrades to 1F seats on A350s and similar seats, which were previously free for Platinum members. These seats offer a significant advantage over other business class seats.

Since Hyatt offers a bonus every 10 nights, I thought we could do the same for airlines, and they listened. As you mentioned, going from 300 to 900 Ultimate Pass Points (UXP) is a long journey. Setting intermediate goals motivates customers to progress, to fly more to earn a reward.

My next step is this: The number of Ultimate customers is not very high yet, but the next step is to encourage them to accumulate well beyond 900 UXP in order to benefit from additional advantages, beyond simply carrying over points to the following year.

Regards

It sucks. Another us empire style hustle. Tell it like it is.

Agree. Better than nothing. 15K miles is not much comparing how many you need even for short flight