Quick Points: Use Flying Blue’s calendar search tool to find cheaper award tickets
Air France-KLM Flying Blue is known for having a difficult-to-use award booking platform. Fortunately, the European loyalty program has made progress by squashing its pesky award search glitch and adding complimentary stopovers to its one-way award tickets (when you book over the phone).
Now, you can access the Flying Blue award calendars using a simple trick on Air France’s or KLM’s website, as first reported by Reddit users.
How to access Flying Blue’s award calendar
Award calendars are extremely helpful for flexible travelers or those looking to score a deal on an award flight. Since many programs operate using dynamic pricing, it’s helpful to quickly pinpoint the cheapest prices for an entire month. This can help you identify which days have the lowest award rates and when you might choose to travel.
Let’s look at a one-way business-class flight from San Francisco International Airport (SFO) to Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (AMS).
After logging in to your Flying Blue account, select “Book with Miles.” Enter your search criteria, scroll to the end of the calendar and select the latest date for travel.
On the next page, you’ll see a calendar view with the lowest award prices for each of the preceding months greyed out in the banner above.
While prices over the busy summer period are predictably high, you can see availability at the lowest 50,000-mile rate in February.
Using the flexible calendar search, you can quickly see which months have the lowest award prices and compare those prices to the other months.
Paying 50,000 miles for a nonstop business-class ticket from the West Coast to Europe is a great deal in comparison to other loyalty programs. Therefore, this is an excellent use of Flying Blue miles.
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Plus, with Flying Blue’s free stopover program, you can consider booking a connection in Paris and staying for a few days before continuing to Amsterdam. That effectively gets you two flights for the price of one.
Related: Flying Blue expands free stopovers on award tickets to all partner airlines
Bottom line
During your search, be sure to choose the latest available date on the Air France and KLM websites; you can see an award calendar view for the next 11 months that can be invaluable for your planning, especially if you want to ensure you pay the lowest price and you have some flexibility.
Remember, you can transfer American Express Membership Rewards points, Bilt Rewards Points, Capital One miles, Citi ThankYou Rewards points, Chase Ultimate Rewards points, Wells Fargo Rewards points and Marriott Bonvoy points to Flying Blue.
This makes Flying Blue miles some of the easiest miles to earn and use.
