Right after the ball dropped on 2024, Air France / KLM Flying Blue decided to ring in the New Year by raising its award prices. Economy, premium economy and business class redemptions all went up by ~20-25%, with the lowest, “saver” price for a transatlantic business flight going from 50K to 60K each way.
Flying Blue prices all of its awards dynamically, meaning that those saver prices effectively mean, “starting at.” 50K was a great price for a one-way business class award to Europe. The problem was that awards at that price were rarely available and, instead, 90K-120K (or more) each way was common.
Flying Blue told us that the devaluation was going to help that availability issue:
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…
60K is still a decent price between the US and Europe, and if that price made it possible to open more inventory, it seemed like a fair trade.
Except, there’s a problem. Availability still stinks. Greg was looking at Flying Blue awards a couple of weeks ago and the search left him with one thought: “Non-stops from the US are sad.”
How sad?
I just went through a full year of Flying Blue availability using Seats.aero, looking at flights from all 19 of Air France and KLM’s gateway airports. I found a total of 19 non-stop flights available from just five cities:
That’s everything. For the whole year.
Even worse, 17 of those 19 flights are over a ~2 week period: 12/28/25 – 1/13/25. During the other 50 weeks of the schedule, there are a total of two non-stop, business class saver seats available from the US to Europe.
That’s brutal.
Quick Thoughts
Now’s the time for a couple of caveats. First, there are additional connecting flights available for 60K, including some that involve a non-stop flight that isn’t being sold at 60K. Theoretically, you could book one of those, take the non-stop to Paris or Amsterdam, then get off. Additionally, like its SkyTeam partner Delta, saver availability from Canada and Mexico to Europe is much better, with almost two hundred non-stops with award space.
Still, Seats.aero came up with more than 30,000 unique routes that Flying Blue was selling award seats for from the US to Europe over the next year…and there were a total of 19 flights with non-stop business availability and around 110 connecting flights, most of which involved those 19 non-stops in some way. If we take out 12/28 – 1/13 again, there are a total of 34 connecting flights and 2 non-stops with saver business class availability. Out of 30,000.
I don’t think that the folks over at Flying Blue were intentionally making stuff up when they said that increasing saver prices would lead to more availability and I imagine that revenue management has a lot to do with the situation. But two seats in almost 50 weeks?
Meanwhile, here’s what Greg found over the next year doing the same search on Flying Blue’s SkyTeam partner, Virgin Atlantic:
- 32 flights available at 29K Virgin points
- 154 flights for 50K or less (includes the 29K flights)
- 301 flights at 60K or less (includes the 29K and 50K flights)
Talk about night and day.
If Flying Blue’s saver availability continues to remain as paltry as it is right now, it runs the risk of making itself an afterthought as a means to book transatlantic, premium cabin award travel from the US, much like Delta has become.
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I was just listening to one of your recent podcasts, not sure if was the flagship or Coffee Break or AUA, but recall Greg mentioning a lot of availability via Virgin from the East Coast, am I right?
Thanks for calling out FB on this. Unfortunately a lot of bloggers are pretending this isn’t happening, which looks suspiciously self-serving from a reader’s perspective. The part about this that really rankles for me is that FB promised more availability in exchange for the devaluation but there’s zero evidence of that better availability. If they aren’t going to offer better availability then why even bother jacking up the price? A higher price for something nobody can buy is pointless.
I’ve had pretty good luck in the past 2 years with flights that connect through CDG and AMS. For example, SFO-CDG-PRG and ARN-AMS-LAX.
There’s a typo, “Right after the ball dropped on 2024**”
Not sure what the typo is? The ball in Times Square dropped at the end of 2024.
You can blame this on social media. For 15 years I’ve been consistently booking LAX-CDG business class for 50k, 60k, 80k one way anytime May-August. They had some sort of devaluation from west coast cities including SFO and those are GONE even 330 days out. Only options are flying to DEN, DFW, PHX etc. On Instagram every post it seems is a travel expert telling everyone about transferring points from credit cards to Flying Blue. No one heard of Flying Blue but now every Instagram post is an influencer sipping on a glass of champagne on Air France flying Biz class at 60k miles. So obviously FB is putting a vice on these lower saver awards, now I have to ship 155k miles over for the flights. Considering other options but out of LAX no other carriers non-stop except premium economy nonsense on Norse/French Bee and outrageous Air Tahiti Nui. When folks say social media ruined the worldwide travel experience it’s not an understatement.
Thanks (?) for the very systematic confirmation of what I have been seeing in endless hunting and pecking. They are gone, but we are still here and sitting on an obscene number of AF miles. (Don’t ask.) Delta domestic, maybe? Ugh.To think that just a month ago we flew for 43K one way (CDG-EWR).