A simple solution for finding Finnair award availability

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.

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