For a long time, the Flying Blue program has had a useful, “secret” calendar that lets you see award availability across a variety of dates. While this is still available, it works differently than in the past, as flagged by Frequent Miler. So I wanted to go over the details of that in this post.
In this post:
The trick to seeing the Flying Blue award calendar
Air France-KLM Flying Blue is arguably SkyTeam’s most useful frequent flyer program, and award pricing on Air France and KLM can be really attractive, especially if you can find saver level award availability. The catch is that it’s sometimes hard to come across saver level award availability, though fortunately there’s a secret way to find it.
When ordinarily doing an award search through the Air France or KLM website, you’ll only see availability for a few days at a time. Fortunately there’s a trick to searching award pricing for a month at a time.
When you go to the Air France USA website, start the process of searching for an award, by going to the “Book with Miles” tab. Select whether you want to travel one-way or roundtrip, the origin and destination, the number of travelers, and the cabin you want to travel in.
Then select the absolute furthest date out that the calendar will allow.
For example, it’s currently June 2024, and the calendar goes as far out as June 2025. So select the last date possible, which in this case is June 30, and then click “Search flights.”
The calendar will then bring you the last date in the schedule. You can then see the pricing by month across the top, and you can click the arrow on the left to see availability for months closer in.
This allows you to search availability on a particular route for the entire year in a minute or two.
Note that in the past, the key to unlocking the Flying Blue award calendar was to just leave the “date” field blank. That no longer works, unfortunately, so the above method is the only way to do this now.
Be aware that this only works for routes served by Air France and KLM. So for example, if you’re searching award availability for an itinerary that would require a Delta flight, then this wouldn’t work. Furthermore, in some cases there are discrepancies, where the calendar shows a lower amount than you’ll actually find when you select availability for that date. However, that’s the exception rather than the norm.
Why the Air France-KLM Flying Blue program is useful
The Air France-KLM Flying Blue loyalty program is useful for booking transatlantic business class award seats. Both Air France and KLM release quite a bit of transatlantic award availability, and the best way to book those seats is through the Flying Blue program. Fortunately Flying Blue is partners with major transferable points currencies, making the points easy to come by.
Also keep in mind that Flying Blue allows stopovers even on one-way awards, making these awards easier to maximize. For the time being, these awards have to be booked by phone, though. Still, this is a great way to get a stopover in Amsterdam or Paris enroute to your final destination.
Bottom line
The Flying Blue program has a hidden award search feature, which can be accessed through Air France’s website. Just go to the award search page, start your award search, and search the last date on the calendar, roughly a year out.
This will then return a calendar that shows you pricing by month. With Flying Blue’s dynamic award pricing, this makes it easy to find the best deal.
Anyone else appreciate the Flying Blue award calendar?
The long term calendar does not seem to break down by month anymore and is stuck on individual dates. A real pain!
Any hack to get around not showing partner availability? I’d be flying from CVG or the surrounding cities so it would always be a Delta flight so nothing every comes up searching by the month view. The only sort of workaround I’ve found is to search award availability on Delta and look for the lowest priced days and then search for that day on AF. But it doesn’t always work.
Just tried it, seems its dead.
Also, I can never find good sweet spots with low YQ anymore. What happened to this program.
it works until last week. right now, its daily instead of monthly lowest reward points needed
same, doesn't work. I have 165,000 miles in this and can never find a good redemption anymore.
I keep getting 700,000 miles per person 1 way from the west. LOL
Thank you very much, Ben. I hope they will not find out about this trick and then block it again.
Way to kill it!
Great tip. Thanks.
Ben, this also works if you simply leave the date blank..
It used to, but hasn't been reliably working for awhile. Thanks Ben for this tip!
I just tried it and it does NOT work. I hope they did not catch on already @Ben
Thanks Ben. I’ve been losing my mind trying to look at the calendar the old way. Very helpful!!
This site can’t be reached
airfrance.com took too long to respond.
I often find that the KLM site works better than the Air France site.
That’s useful. Thanks Ben!!
Nice trick
Ben, have you figured out how you're going to get to Europe yet?