The Sad Decline Of Flying Blue Business Class Award Availability

Historically, Air France-KLM Flying Blue has been one of the most useful frequent flyer programs for crossing the Atlantic, both thanks to the attractive award pricing, plus the decent amount of award availability.

However, it sure seems like in recent times, business class award availability across the Atlantic has dried up. Several readers have reached out regarding this, so I decided to do a bit of research.

Flying Blue’s nearly non-existent business class awards

Most recently, a Flying Blue lifetime Platinum member reached out to me to point out the complete lack of saver business class award availability through Flying Blue, saying that this has wiped out the program for him in terms of value, and he now finds it to be totally useless. He asked me to look into this and report back, so that’s exactly what I’m doing.

Let me say that in general, it’s hard to take a “static” look at award availability, since obviously an important consideration is how fast people snag awards. So I’ll do the best I can, but obviously I can’t speak to internal numbers as to how many people have already booked awards on a particular flight, etc.

I decided to pull up business class award availability through Flying Blue from all gateways in the United States, searching Paris (CDG) as the destination. For what it’s worth, Flying Blue starts releasing award availability 359 days out. So, how many total business class award seats are there over that period?

• There are zero award seats from Boston (BOS), Chicago (ORD), Dallas (DFW), Detroit (DTW), Los Angeles (LAX), Miami (MIA), Minneapolis (MSP), New York (JFK), Orlando (MCO), Phoenix (PHX), and San Francisco (SFO)
• There is one day with a business class award seat from Atlanta (ATL)
• There is one day with a business class award seat from Houston (IAH)
• There is one day with a business class award seat from Newark (SEA)
• There is one day with a business class award seat from Seattle (SEA)
• There are two days with business class award seats from Denver (DEN)
• There are three days with business class award seats from Washington (IAD)

I’m no mathematician, but you don’t even have to be able to count to 10 to figure out how many flights have saver award space through Flying Blue over the next year.