Frequent Miler's latest team challenge, Million Mile Madness, is happening now! Follow us as Greg, Nick, and Stephen compete to earn 1 Million SAS miles by flying 15 airlines before November 23rd. Who will complete the challenge with the most Speed, Affordability, and Style?
Earlier this year, Finnair finalized its loyalty program changeover to Avios. When they first announced that change last year, they also advised that they’d be providing guaranteed award availability on every flight – a minimum of four economy and two business class seats in Europe and a minimum of four economy, two premium economy and two business class seats for flights between Europe and Asia, North America, and Dubai.
The thing is, people have often had little success finding award availability on Finnair, leading some to suspect that perhaps Finnair’s definition of ‘guaranteed’ was obtained from a different kind of dictionary.
As it turns out, there’s a simple trick to gaining access to increased award availability – pretend you’re in Finland.
One Mile At A Time highlighted that the solution really is this simple. For example, my account is set to the US. When doing a business class award search for December 29 (and three days either side) from Los Angeles to Helsinki, there’s zero award availability.
However, after changing my location from the US to Finland at the top of the page on desktop (you can leave your language as English), then running the same search, all of a sudden it found some availability.
Now, a one-way business class award from the west coast to Europe for 118,000 Avios isn’t exactly stellar, but it’s great that this solution works. It’s not clear if this is a glitch or if Finnair is trying to preserve award availability for Finns, but at least you now have a better chance of redeeming Avios to go to HEL.
Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
Chef’s kiss
Minimum of two seats does not work for a family of 4.
Parents in biz, kids in premium economy
I just changed it to uk and it also worked.
lol. To go to HEL
But…but…but…it’s COOOOLLLLLLDDDDDDD!
Yes, HEL does freeze over for much of the year. But connections to warmer locations are available if you don’t mind a flight from HEL. Jokes aside, they are a decent airline.