Questions and Answers

Want to fly business class on Air France 380 plane in September 2020 from JFK to Rome, then Rome to Paris, stay a week and fly back to JFK again on Air France 380 plane. I can’t find anything about award miles for Air France. Also would it be better to just try to get business class tickets to and from Paris on Air France using miles. Then just purchase my own tickets for short trip to Rome on each end? Is there another way to do this with other carriers’ sites?

Welcome [USER=5900]@Gaetana[/USER] – Air France is part of the SkyTeam alliance, same as Delta. Air France’s frequent flyer program is called Flying Blue. I’d suggest you start with the Beginner’s Guide which can be found under the Start Here tab at the top. Note the section on how alliances work to get a good overview.

Then if you have more questions feel free to come back and ask!

Keep in mind that the A380 business class seats are not fully lie-flat so while they’re certainly better than economy, they’re nothing special.

A bit of a warning though, if you decide to use Flying Blue to book an award on Air France. Based on your question I assume you do not have a Flying Blue account. If you create one for the sole purpose of transferring miles and book award travel, you are very likely to run into a major headache. Flying Blue is known to flag those accounts as fraudulent, and will make you go through many hoops – including going in person to the airport – to finalize the booking. There is not a whole lot of workarounds, except having a history with Flying Blue.

Using another SkyTeam like Delta to book might be a better idea even if will likely cost more points.

And as @MidSouthSkier wisely pointed out, business class on Air France’s A380 is not great. I would ride the 777 instead if you can.

As someone who does the route to FCO (Rome) from the US and returns out of CDG (Paris) frequently for work, in business class, I would strongly discourage you from using Air France A380 Business Class if you’re paying cash for your flights because it’s not a good business class product and for the same money you can do better. I’d book an open jaw trip landing in Rome and returning out of Paris, and buying a one way ticket from Rome to Paris on a discount carrier. Delta has the best product going to Paris with their Delta One Suites but I’m not sure they fly those out of JFK. In any event, Delta and American Airlines have excellent options out of JFK.

Hey! Just to join in with the crowd, Air France’s A380 is extremely outdated. They no longer have plans to retrofit these planes as they’re getting rid of them soon. May I suggest flying their new A350? I know they’re only flying it to Toronto in the near future, but maybe in Sep2020 they’ll expand their routes?