After being largely broken for years, Flying Blue’s award search feature finally works properly(ish)…
In this post:
What was wrong with Flying Blue’s award search tool
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.
The catch is that actually finding that award availability historically hasn’t been easy. Odds are that you either know exactly what I’m talking about, or have no clue what I’m talking about.
Basically in the past when you used the Air France or KLM website to search award availability, you’d have one shot. You need to log into your account to find availability, and then you’d be able to make one search. If you wanted to change what you were searching (like the routes, dates, etc.), the website would totally error out.
You’d have to open a completely new browser to make a new search. It was a pain, to put it mildly, and amazingly enough, this issue persisted for years. The best workaround was to use the KLM mobile app, which didn’t have this issue, but that’s hardly an ideal way to search award availability.
Funny enough, for about a year I was under the impression I was just having issues on my end, until someone else mentioned this to me, and that’s when it became clear this was a widespread problem.
Flying Blue’s award search tool finally works
Well, there’s finally some good news — the Air France and KLM award search tools now work mostly correctly. As before, you have to log-in, and then enter your origin, destination, dates, class of service, and number of travelers.
When you get to the results page, you can now click “CHANGE” to modify the itinerary you’re searching, and amazingly enough it doesn’t error out.
Rather it brings you back to the search page. It’s still not perfect — when you get brought back to the search page, it defaults to the “Book a flight” option rather than the “Book with Miles” function, and it also defaults to searching a roundtrip rather than a one-way (even if you were previously searching one-way).
Regardless, being able to conduct multiple award searches without having to open or close your browser is a real treat compared to the old search tool.
Bottom line
The Flying Blue award search tool seems to have undergone some significant upgrades. For years it wasn’t possible to conduct multiple award searches in a single session, as the site would somehow error out. That’s no longer an issue, which is surely a welcome change for anyone searching Flying Blue award availability.
Anyone else happy to see this change?
Is their search engine broken again? It looks like if you find availability for a route once, it disappears if you refresh or try again
The search function is broken again.
I do not think this airline is competent.
Omg haha I thought it was just me as well this entire time. Good to know the app works better.
Being able to search for round trip award flights also hasn't worked for years (on website, I haven't tried using app). Searching for awards was a laborious process of searching one way, one date at a time. Then searching one way for return flights and then doing a specific search for round trip for the dates found. And even then it often gave an error when trying to book and you had to call Flying...
Being able to search for round trip award flights also hasn't worked for years (on website, I haven't tried using app). Searching for awards was a laborious process of searching one way, one date at a time. Then searching one way for return flights and then doing a specific search for round trip for the dates found. And even then it often gave an error when trying to book and you had to call Flying Blue because the miles or $ amount wasn't the same as what was shown on the web.
Their website has been a mess for years. Bad software and presumably they didn't have the money to hire more outside developers to fix it.
There are ways around their search once problem because it's mainly their site's inability to handle cookies properly and more concerning their security probably bites too. But if you employ a vpn most of the issues will go away. Even better (yes this is your Xmas gift for reading this...
Their website has been a mess for years. Bad software and presumably they didn't have the money to hire more outside developers to fix it.
There are ways around their search once problem because it's mainly their site's inability to handle cookies properly and more concerning their security probably bites too. But if you employ a vpn most of the issues will go away. Even better (yes this is your Xmas gift for reading this far) for some reason a vpn can produce better (though not always) redemptions. I was doing a search for Paris to lax a few years ago and it was 180k but when I flipped on my vpn the search came back with 118k. Being a programmer I redid it 3x to reproduce the anomaly to convince myself I wasn't hitting the bottle too hard that day.
were you changing your home country with your VPN?
I second Jennie on this, that's an amazing discovery, please share more info on how you used the VPN, that would be the best Xmas gift ! :-)
The next thing is for them to fix AM inventory on transatlantic flights
I find the speed (or lack of) navigating between pages frustrating, and the random need to frequently re-login.
On a separate note, I am simply amazed that a flight on one day is available for, say, 70,000 miles, while the same flight the next day is 638,000 miles! Dynamic pricing at its best/worst I'm sure.
I hope AlaskaMP isn't adopting this model in their much-touted revamp today!
wow I assumed this was just an issue i was having, had no idea it was affecting everyone.
Oh wow. I totally thought it was local issues on my end. Super annoying bug. Glad its somewhat fixed.
Wow I also assumed that somehow this issue was isolated to me. Although found it strange that I continued to have the issue even after switching to a new computer. Funny to know that it is just how it was.
What about various airlines and within-country (not in Europe)? Technically, I should be able to book a flight from LA to Salt Lake City on Delta or Nairobi to Lusaka on Kenya Airways, too. Bit the system did not include such flights. Since it is almost impossible now to reach a live human this is important.
The search features on AF, Delta, and Virgin are quite similar and, given that they are partners, I somewhat suspect that they all operate on the same "back end." When accessing Virgin's site via a desktop browser, there was a known bug that affected about 10 percent of Virgin's members. Clearing cookies, incognito mode, etc. did not help. It affected me for a while. The solution was to use the mobile app (as some have noted as a solution for AF/KLM).
It's still very buggy, as you point out.
I'm waiting for stopovers/multi-city to become available, per that announcement earlier in the fall.
Still a bit short of a La Premiere award with your 170K FB balance :) !
Hope you manage to snag one before it all change early 2023!
I believe that Ben said in another article that he was throwing in the towel.
Another inconsistency of this website which can see right in your screenshot for search results for Miami to Johannesburg on Feb 8 is sometimes in the buttons on the calendar dates in the top the minimum number of miles for flights available on a given day show up below the date. This is very useful if are trying to find available dates when are flexible on when to go, and quite annoying when it doesn't...
Another inconsistency of this website which can see right in your screenshot for search results for Miami to Johannesburg on Feb 8 is sometimes in the buttons on the calendar dates in the top the minimum number of miles for flights available on a given day show up below the date. This is very useful if are trying to find available dates when are flexible on when to go, and quite annoying when it doesn't display and have to click on EACH individual day to see what's available.
I found a workaround to always show these number of miles displayed each day to first do a flight search for cash fares, then click the "change" button to modify search from cash to miles....then usually I see the results displayed as mentioned.
I've had this issue for years on Chrome but never on Edge. Just figured it was an issue with my Chrome. Good to know others had the issue also.
I've been using the Air France mobile app on Android. It works well enough even though the "lowest price" for a particular day was almost never accurate (usually several thousand points higher, or tens of thousands of points higher than actual prices). It's somehow less broken than Delta's website (which usually crashes after making dozens of inquiries forcing you to open up a new browser), and web app (which often forces you to refresh or...
I've been using the Air France mobile app on Android. It works well enough even though the "lowest price" for a particular day was almost never accurate (usually several thousand points higher, or tens of thousands of points higher than actual prices). It's somehow less broken than Delta's website (which usually crashes after making dozens of inquiries forcing you to open up a new browser), and web app (which often forces you to refresh or start a new search at random).
The KLM mobile app for Android was a good workaround for this problem in the past.
I thought I was going insane and was actually going to write to you about this. Shocking it took them so long.
“Mostly correctly?” I’m offering my proofreading services, sir…
As a proofreader, you would certainly know that the original quote does not contain a question mark. “Mostly correctly?” is incorrect. The exact quote is “Mostly correctly”. Therefore, if you are questioning it, you should have written, “Mostly correctly”? I’m offering my foolproof reading services sir..