Air France / KLM Flying Blue miles are super easy to get. You can transfer 1 to 1 from any major transferable points currency: Amex, Capital One, Chase, Citi, Bilt, or even Brex. Even better, you’ll often find transfer bonuses. In fact, there are 25% bonuses right now from both Chase (details here) and Citi (details here). If you then sprinkle in the fact that Air France / KLM often has excellent award prices, you get an awesome combo. Except for one thing: low cost awards can be hard to find. Luckily, there’s a great trick to make it easy…
Flying Blue award searches used to automatically show a full month of results at a time, but in recent years that calendar appeared to have been discontinued. Fortunately, there’s a super easy way to see the award calendar: don’t enter dates into the search screen (Hat Tip PhatMiles).
Step 1: Enter Search Criteria w/out Dates
Go to airfrance.us and log into your Flying Blue account (create one if you don’t already have one). Click “Book with Miles” and enter your search criteria as shown above. Don’t enter dates.
Then click “Search Flights.”
Step 2: View Monthly Calendar
By leaving out dates from your search criteria, results should appear on a monthly calendar as shown above.
Bonus Tip: If you drill down to a specific date and then want to quickly return to calendar view, in the URL you can simply change the word “offers” to “open-dates”.
Calendar Issues
The calendar view can be very helpful for finding saver level awards on Air France (and maybe KLM), but it’s not perfect. Here are some issues I’ve come across:
- Air France / KLM Only: It doesn’t show award pricing for other airlines. For example, there may be award availability on Delta and/or Virgin Atlantic which can be booked with Flying Blue miles, but the calendar won’t show it.
- Results don’t always match class of service: In one search for business class awards, I saw a day that appeared to have business class award availability for about 55,000 points (which is reasonable), but when I clicked on the date, that option didn’t show. I finally checked economy pricing and found an option for 55,000 points there.
- Sometimes the calendar refuses to show any results at all. I don’t know if that means that there is no Saver level availability or if something else is going on.
- When trying to edit the initial search criteria, I frequently run into a “forever hourglass”. Basically the system is stuck until I fully log out, close out my browsers, and try again later or try again with a different browser instance.
Despite all of the above issues, this can be a very helpful tool for finding Air France / KLM award availability. Good luck!
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Greg, why do airlines (apparently) want to make it so difficult to search for award tickets?
this seems to be dead now
seems to be back! woot!
This hasn’t worked in days. I think AF killed it.
still waiting for the “trick”
shitty clickbait article… disappointed.
Nice calendar. I had a few business flights with AF in 2020 and 2021 (and one that I had to cancel at the beginning of 2022). Since then, AF raised significantly the award flight mileage requirement which makes it less appealing.
The calendar quite often shows lower mileage available but when clicking on that date, the price advertised is nowhere to be found. This is not just for business class, the same thing happens for economy.
And sometimes it is the opposite – the calendar shows higher mileage than when you click on a specific date. So it appears the calendar feature is not reliable.
using the air france mobile app also v. easy way to see multiple days at a time, and it works even if you’ve entered dates. Though, still sometimes a bit buggy with the issues you note. I’ve also had it sometimes show pricing that is way higher when there is an available cheaper date. I also find it far faster to scroll through multiple dates using the mobile app.
Any tricks to finding flyingblue awards flights on the other carriers? I was looking for the Virgin Atlantic / Delta One rewards you blogged about a few days ago, and I’m having no luck!
Thanks!!!
If you can find the awards on the Virgin Atlantic website then they should be available on the same dates through the Air France website.
You dont need to edit the URL. Put in the airports, leave the dates as blank and hit search. Automatically renders the monthly calendar via the “open-dates” method.
Wow, that is easier! Thanks! I’ll update the post now.
Thanks Phat, I’ll check out your blog if you have one