Thrifty Traveler points out what appears to be a devaluation of Air France / KLM Flying Blue miles: the minimum pricing for awards in all three cabins (economy, premium economy, and business class) has increased around 25%. We reached out to Flying Blue for comment and confirmed these changes — read on for more details below.
Air France KLM Flying Blue long ago abandoned its award charts in favor of dynamic pricing for awards on its own metal. Surprisingly, in late 2023, we saw Flying Blue take the unexpected step of decreasing award pricing on their own flights. Flying Blue strikes me as a program that would like to get your attention and that was certainly a way to get most it.
However, I’d long thought that we’d see an increase in award pricing eventually.
The bad news here is that prices have indeed increased for awards on Air France or KLM-operated flights. That’s obviously disappointing for anyone who was eyeing a cheaper booking but hadn’t yet finalized it. Similarly, if you’ve transferred points to Flying Blue speculatively or you have points locked up with Flying Blue from cancelled trips, they aren’t necessarily going to buy as much as you’d hoped. I know that in my case, I have a trip booked with Flying Blue miles later this year. I certainly hope that trips goes as planned because if I have to cancel, I might need to move over more points to complete a booking.
As an example, business class awards between the Europe and the United States, which had in late 2023 been reduced to just 50,000 miles one-way, now start at 60,000 miles each way — an increase of 20%.
Keep in mind that we’re talking the low end of pricing. Awards are still dynamically priced, so you may certainly see awards that are much more expensive, too. And sometimes, even when it says that awards are available for 60,000 miles (see the calendar dates at the top), the actual price may vary (here, it is really 61,000 miles).
When I first saw Thrifty Traveler’s report, I had hoped that perhaps there were still some diamonds in the rough to be found, like perhaps if routes from Canada still priced cheaper or awards that mixed a plane and a train might not have increased in price. But sure enough, even Montreal to Brussels (where the leg from Paris to Brussels is on a train) prices at the new 60K low point on dates that I checked.
The above examples are all in business class, but Thrifty Traveler reports that economy redemptions increased from 20K to 25K miles each way and that the premium economy starting price increased from 35K to 40K.
Note that these increases affect flights operated by Air France and KLM, but not partner award flights.
I’m not surprised, but I’m particularly disappointed that Flying Blue decided to increase award rates without notice or notification. That’s become the modus operandi for dynamically-priced programs — those programs that don’t have an award chart don’t feel a need to let you know when they increase minimum pricing. That’s too bad as I can’t imagine that the cost of giving members at least a few months of notice would be terribly high, particularly given the fact that the airline has total control over the award inventory they make available, anyway.
While I’m always disappointed to see award price increases, the flip side here is that Flying Blue tells us that this was done to expand availability at the lower levels. Benjamin Lipsey, President of Flying Blue tells us:
Recently, we made a slight adjustment to award mile pricing and corresponding inventory access to address a common concern: the difficulty of finding availability at the lowest award levels.
By rebalancing the entry-level pricing, we were able to significantly increase entry-level award availability, making it easier for members to book flights at the lowest mileage levels……
…..While I can certainly appreciate that nobody likes price increases, the reality is this change ensures better access to rewards for all our members, avoiding the frustration seen in some programs where limited availability (be it award tickets, upgrades, etc.) undermines member benefits. We remain committed to listening, innovating, and delivering meaningful value to our Flying Blue members.
Essentially, Flying Blue is saying that finding 50K awards was difficult and by increasing the floor price of the minimum pricing band, they will be able to offer more award inventory.
It’s hard to say whether that will be true since none of us has a crystal ball. I wouldn’t say that I found 60K awards to be widely available in my small search sample size, but if this change does make it easier for average members to find lower-priced awards, I’m sure some will appreciate it.
And the truth is that even at 25K economy / 40K premium economy / 60K business class for the lowest-priced awards, Flying Blue is still a very competitive option. That’s particularly true when you start to consider the number of bank programs with which they partner for points transfers and the frequency of transfer bonuses.
Through that lens, this feels like a relatively mild devaluation. Yes, minimum prices have gone up by as much as 25% (in the economy class cabin), but the devaluations to premium economy and business weren’t quite as much. Given how many options one has for earning Flying Blue miles, that’s not the worst we’ve seen.
It’s worth a mention that if you can find awards available via Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, you may pay less. Virgin Atlantic offers a really nice award chart for Air France and KLM-operated flights (that now looks even better by comparison). That said, Flying Blue doesn’t always make a ton of inventory available to partner programs, so you’ll need both knowledge and a little luck to score a better deal through Virgin Atlantic.
Overall, it’s a bummer to see a price increase, but Air France KLM Flying Blue continues to offer decent award pricing — even if not as good as it once was.
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Another silent scam devaluation by Flying Blue, Air France, KLM. If they offer mileage transfers there should be clear language what the devaluation roadmap is. For anyone inclined to complaining to regulators this might be an avenue google EU “National Competition Authorities”
With endless transfer bonuses to FlyingBlue you know exactly why the price increases more or less match those bonuses. It’s no accident.
This announcement from Air France is purely fraudulent! They don’t have ANY fares across the board from San Francisco to anywhere in France at the announced prices. THIS IS PURE FRAUD! Once I move to Paris I will be using the superior TGV to move around Europe………And for my trips back to the states on those rare occasions I will use Qatar! Longer flight but cheaper and more luxurious!
In general anything out of IAH when I’ve looked has been Delta-esque pricing in Business on AF /KLM lately …. And I’ve had very good luck in the past securing these awards at very good prices.
A BS explanation because they could just have offered more seats at 60k while keeping the floor at 50k.
I totally understand why you’d say that. My bet (and this is a bet that extends beyond Flying Blue to other award programs) is that the loyalty program is essentially a separate entity that is buying tickets from the airline, so when a member redeems X number of miles, the airline gets $X from the loyalty program (yes, I understand that to you and I it is all the same thing, but I imagine it isn’t from an accounting perspective). And so I imagine that the same way that hotels negotiate a reimbursement rate from Marriott or Expedia or whatever, the airline and the loyalty program likely negotiate reimbursement rates. Based on that educated guess, I’m assuming that programs with completely revenue-based tickets (like Southwest charging 7,385 miles for a ticket) probably negotiate reimbursement rates on a per-point basis. My bet is that a program like Flying Blue probably negotiates pricing bands on like a sliding scale. My guess is that if they offered seats at 50K, they probably needed more seats at a higher level to balance out the amount of money they need to bring in to cover costs. By increasing the minimum to 60K, they could offer more inventory.
I don’t know for sure that’s the way it works, but I could imagine a world in which adding more seats at 60K may not have solved the problem and/or keeping seats at 50K creates more ill will (since you’re setting yourself up for people to constantly say about your product “It starts as low as 50K miles, but you probably won’t find anything for less than 60K miles) then it is worth. Like I’m sure that they could offer a couple of seats (systemwide) for 10,000 miles each, but then it would only benefit a couple of people and it would lead to it feeling like a bit of a broken promise (enter promo rewards, where they can offer that lower price when they have extra inventory without setting the permanent expectation that people can find it for 50K).
Again, I don’t like a price increase more than anybody else. But I can understand one here and in these amounts and find it far more reasonable than blowing the lid off things (a la Delta) and charging any old crazy amount.
It’s not the miles, they charge sky high taxes on top of them, so this is a lot worse than Nick says.
Let’s be clear — it’s not high taxes (everybody pays taxes), it’s the carrier-imposed surcharges that are high. Yeah, I don’t like that at all. I especially hate it since I travel as a family of four — so it’s about $1,000 each way in fees for my family. I long avoided Flying Blue because of those. I wish they’d get rid of them.
All that said, I think calling them “sky high” isn’t quite right. British Airways charges upwards of $800 or more each way in carrier-imposed surcharges. Virgin Atlantic was long the same (though they’ve recently introduced reduced fees with their dynamic pricing). Emirates charges more than $1,000 in fees on one-way awards. Lufthansa is also around $700 or $800 (which gets passed on if booking via a partner like ANA). The surcharges on ANA are more than $400 now I believe. Turkish is more than $300 each way. Because of all of those examples, I think it’s a stretch to call Flying Blue’s surcharges “sky high”. I think it’s more accurate to say they have moderate surcharges — far more than I want to pay, but by comparison to other programs that collect surcharges, not sky high.
All that said, if you think of pennies as points and add in the $200+ in surcharges each way, you’re looking at new award rates around 80K, which aren’t wildly high, but neither are they special compared to everybody else. However, when you catch a transfer bonus of let’s say 25% and you’re paying 48,000 points plus the ~20K in taxes and fees (considering pennies as points), you can sort of mentally blend that to 68K points (plus a bit more depending on the situation as the taxes & fees totals differs a bit I think). That’s how I think about programs with surcharges — I mentally add them to the award total at $0.01 = 1 point/mile. With a transfer bonus, Flying Blue remains pretty competitive in my mind. And if they are able to offer good availability (which we have seen in the past — hopefully we’ll see that in the future), then I think the increase will have been worth it. However, that really hinges on their being enough availability. If I can’t easily find availability at 60K, I’m not going to be too enthused about 80K plus surcharges.
And just to follow up with a thought I only half-surfaced — I long avoided Flying Blue entirely because of the high surcharges, but in the past couple of years I’ve ended up flying or booking them a few times because they had availability at low prices when others didn’t. Later this year, we’re flying to and from Europe on a family trip with a total of 8 passengers and I found the lowest-level awards available for 8 people in both directions (50K per passenger via Flying Blue one way and 48.5K per passenger via Virgin Atlantic but still traveling on Air France in the other direction). The surcharges obviously worked out to be a lot, but the ability to get 8 people on the same itinerary made that a tradeoff I was good with. Then also consider that children get a 25% discount on the miles required (ages 2-11), so it worked out a bit better.
Did the cash component increase?
I have flown KLM business several times the past year for 50K, but beginning sometime after April that disappeared. I would find maybe one day a month for that. The new standard seems to be 107-109K each way. In November, with a transfer bonus, I could get it for ~85K. For that amount you can fly just about anyone.
I’ve noticed this for several months now and I was wishing that they would adjust like they did in ‘23. I was able to get award flights (business) at 50-55k from the West Coast to Europe. Now seeing 77-100k. I knew the lower rates wouldn’t last. These rates aren’t too bad but the 50-55k were amazing.
I can confirm the 25% increase of economy fares. I was looking at some flights on Sunday and it was 20,000 miles. Then on Monday, Jan 13, it became 25,000 miles. Should have pulled the trigger on Sunday…
Same
I suggest to check Virgin Atlantic. I ended up booking the same AF flight via Virgin Atlantic. The fees are bit higher than AF, but it’s only 12,000 Virgin points compared to 25,000 Flying Blue miles. If my math is right, the cents per point (CPP) for AF is 5.52, which is not bad at all despite the 25% increase. But Virgin’s CP is 11, which is double of AF.