The Sad Decline Of Flying Blue Business Class Award Availability

Historically, Air France-KLM Flying Blue has been one of the most useful frequent flyer programs for crossing the Atlantic, both thanks to the attractive award pricing, plus the decent amount of award availability.

However, it sure seems like in recent times, business class award availability across the Atlantic has dried up. Several readers have reached out regarding this, so I decided to do a bit of research.

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Flying Blue’s nearly non-existent business class awards

Most recently, a Flying Blue lifetime Platinum member reached out to me to point out the complete lack of saver business class award availability through Flying Blue, saying that this has wiped out the program for him in terms of value, and he now finds it to be totally useless. He asked me to look into this and report back, so that’s exactly what I’m doing.

Let me say that in general, it’s hard to take a “static” look at award availability, since obviously an important consideration is how fast people snag awards. So I’ll do the best I can, but obviously I can’t speak to internal numbers as to how many people have already booked awards on a particular flight, etc.

I decided to pull up business class award availability through Flying Blue from all gateways in the United States, searching Paris (CDG) as the destination. For what it’s worth, Flying Blue starts releasing award availability 359 days out. So, how many total business class award seats are there over that period?

• There are zero award seats from Boston (BOS), Chicago (ORD), Dallas (DFW), Detroit (DTW), Los Angeles (LAX), Miami (MIA), Minneapolis (MSP), New York (JFK), Orlando (MCO), Phoenix (PHX), and San Francisco (SFO)
• There is one day with a business class award seat from Atlanta (ATL)
• There is one day with a business class award seat from Houston (IAH)
• There is one day with a business class award seat from Newark (EWR)
• There is one day with a business class award seat from Seattle (SEA)
• There are two days with business class award seats from Denver (DEN)
• There are three days with business class award seats from Washington (IAD)

I’m no mathematician, but you don’t even have to be able to count to 10 to figure out how many flights have saver award space through Flying Blue over the next year. 😉 That’s obviously really rough, and I think it’s safe to say that saver business class award availability is basically non-existent.

Keep in mind that between Air France and KLM, the airlines operate nearly 50 daily flights to the United States. So to do some very rough math, let’s assume the airline has 30 business class seats per flight (that’s intentionally conservative), meaning there are around 550,000 business class seats across the Atlantic per year. Nine of those seats are available as awards, which comes out to 0.000016% of inventory.

Now, Flying Blue has dynamic award pricing, so you can just about always redeem miles for a flight, it’s just a function of what the cost is. In theory, saver level business class awards are supposed to cost 60,000 miles. The actual pricing available is almost always more than twice that much, and often way more than that. For example, on the New York to Paris route, not a single day has a business class award for under 139,500 miles.

So we’ll see how this evolves, but based on how things currently stand, I wouldn’t consider Flying Blue to be a useful program for transatlantic business class awards, because availability has gotten really bad. Of course everyone should crunch the numbers for themselves and research availability for what they’re looking for, but the current situation isn’t good.

Look, no one expects that there’s going to be saver level business class award availability on a majority of flights, as the economics don’t make sense. However, saver availability has gone from being something you can find with effort and flexibility, to basically being like winning the lottery.

A couple considerations with Flying Blue availability

While Flying Blue’s saver level award availability is worse than I’ve ever seen before, there are a couple of things I should point out.

First of all, Flying Blue uses married segment pricing for awards. So while there are zero saver level business class awards from New York to Paris, you’ll see some amount of saver award availability if continuing onwards to some other destinations. For example, if you instead set Madrid (MAD) as the destination, you’ll suddenly find a total of seven dates across the year with award availability. That’s still really bad, but seven is more than zero.

Furthermore, award availability seems to be a bit better if you don’t touch the United States, even if flying to or from Paris. For example, while I wouldn’t say availability is great, there at least an average of a handful of days per month where you’ll find saver award availability in other long haul markets.

Keep in mind that Flying Blue recently increased award costs, with the promise of more award availability. Maybe the argument could be made that availability improved in some other markets, but it’s definitely not the case for the United States.

Bottom line

Saver level business class award availability with Air France-KLM seems to have reached a new low, at least across the Atlantic. While the program used to be good about making saver level award seats available, that’s not the case right now.

I hope this is temporary, and that award availability doesn’t stay this bad permanently. Until something changes, I’d approach Flying Blue with caution when it comes to transferring miles, assuming you’re based in the United States.