As noted by View from the Wing, this is a useful reminder of a feature that many people aren’t aware of…
In this post:
The trick to seeing the Flying Blue award calendar
The Air France-KLM Flying Blue program has dynamic award pricing, so the cost of an award ticket can vary significantly based on when you’re traveling. As a result, it’s always useful to be able to comparison shop across a bunch of days.
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. The key is to leave the travel dates blank.
By leaving the travel dates blank, you’ll be brought to a page that displays an award calendar, showing availability a month at a time. You can then also easily switch between months, so in a matter of a minute you can search availability for the entire year.
This is a useful feature, though perhaps not as useful as the Flying Blue award search feature having been fixed a few weeks back.
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 now 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.
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, and start your award search, but don’t enter a date. You’ll then see a calendar that displays pricing for a month at a time. With Flying Blue’s dynamic award pricing, this makes it easy to find the best deal.
Anyone else appreciate the Flying Blue award calendar?
This is false and does not work, so is all of the other ways I found on the other blogs.
For me it flashes up with a calendar, and then goes back to the search page saying there are not fares available for that date.
Doesn't work for me.
This didn’t work for me. It kept saying something like: no results matching your search. I was searching one way OKC-KRK. Does this work for one way searches?
The award calander is not (at least not always accurate) it may show x amount of points for x dates but when you select the dates it's not there (at the amount of points quoted on the calendar)
The calendar seems broken. It shows dates with prices, but clicking any date takes you to the standard FlyingBlue no availability error that says "Sorry, there are no fares available for this date. Please try again."
Trying to search the specific date shown on the calendar from the main search also gives the same error.
Doesn't seem like the calendar actually works, sadly.
I get an error message - it is requiring that I enter dates
It won’t let me do that. I am forced to log in to use book with miles, then I must select travel dates. No way around it.
I scored 2 adults 1 child (5yo-11, they apparently distinguish between the ages) on AF in the middle of July for a total of 156k miles. Average of 52k per person in business! Deals do happen!
Good tip. I booked two award seats for ATL-CDG one way earlier this week. I was shocked to find two seats in Business for "only" 138k each. In the past - though I have not been to Europe since 2018 - I could reliably get ~60k redemptions in Delta One for ATL-BRU and just take the train to Paris. But literally everything for DL all summer was $375k SkyMiles ones way. If that continues to...
Good tip. I booked two award seats for ATL-CDG one way earlier this week. I was shocked to find two seats in Business for "only" 138k each. In the past - though I have not been to Europe since 2018 - I could reliably get ~60k redemptions in Delta One for ATL-BRU and just take the train to Paris. But literally everything for DL all summer was $375k SkyMiles ones way. If that continues to be a trend, I may have to consider using my miles for domestic flights since almost all of our flying is Delta living in Atlanta. I generally save miles for overseas trips but 375k renders SkyMiles nearly useless.
Thank you this is very helpful!
Just today I found the monthly calendar by accident. On an outbound date search I wasn't happy with the lowest points charged, so I hit the following day button on the week calendar.
I was going to repeat this move until I found the points amount I could live with. But after trying a couple of dates with no luck, the monthly calendar opened up on its own. This also happened on my inbound search. Weird.
Thanks for an easier way to do it.
Maybe you can fly the 777 to stay at this 737. First class.
https://www.expedia.co.id/en/Pecatu-Hotels-Private-Jet-Villa-By-Hanging-Gardens-Air.h88482955.Hotel-Information
Super useful and too funny that I've just never thought to leave the dates blank... I feel like it's more of a glitch than a "useful tool" and was discovered by someone who accidentally hit submit without putting their dates in. Thanks for the tip!
This strategy doesn't work on Air France Canada website. The system won't proceed without dates. Lucky Americans!
The cheapest flights over in J are aways north of 80,000 (the base for YVR in J one way) at around 144,000 in January. Not a great deal at all.
This is incredibly helpful, thanks.
I think the Flying Blue Awards Programme is in a way misleading FB members by not telling about miles needed for certain routes which never are available during the whole calender year. As an example
BUE - AMS or BUE - PAR one way in economy you need 31.500 miles, I searched on each day in 2023 and there isn't one day with 31.500 miles needed for an award flight.
Unfortunately, neither the KLM site or the Air France site will allow me to continue searching for an award ticket unless I enter a departure date. I was so hoping this trick would work!
this is great, but every time I try to use KLM or Air France from Washington-Dulles it's like 555000 miles one way in business class to anywhere in Europe. It's frustrating. I never see the famous 55k awards this and other sites talk about.
Try Toronto, or Montreal
I realize it's just 1 data point but in December I found availability for at least 2 @ 55k from JFK to Berlin via CDG. I did have to fly 1 day earlier than I originally planned to but we'll worth it as the next day was almost double.
Crazy thing was that Economy was actually a few miles MORE for the same flight!
Good luck.
That is a great hint for the ones who were not aware of it.