We got a great tip from Erda in the Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group about an Air France/KLM sweet spot which may or may not be a glitch. You can currently book domestic Delta flights from only 2,000 Flying Blue miles in economy and from 5,000 miles in first class.
This pricing only seems to be available on short haul routes, but it represents savings of about 75% compared to the number of SkyMiles that Delta wants for the same award flights.
One of the examples that Erda provided was flying from Albany to New York City. The award pricing initially displays as 5,000 miles in economy or 15,000 in first class for the hour-long flight (note that Flying Blue labels it as business class, but it’s domestic first). That pricing is pretty good seeing as Delta seems to charge about twice that when redeeming SkyMiles.
However, that pricing gets significantly better. If you expand one of the itineraries to actually book it, you’ll see that on at least some dates you can book this flight for only 3,000 miles in economy or 7,500 miles in first.
That’s superb, especially seeing as the taxes and fees amount to $15.91 – only ~$10 more than you’d usually expect to pay for a domestic award flight through other programs.
Erda highlighted some other routes such as Seattle to Vancouver which is bookable from only 2,500 miles. The lowest pricing they identified was between Detroit and Cleveland which can be booked from only 2,000 Flying Blue miles one way in economy or only 5,000 miles in first class.
That pricing is unbelievable considering Delta wants 17,500 SkyMiles for basic economy and 31,500 SkyMiles for first class.
Based on the fact that these tickets don’t come with seat selection, it looks like you’ll get booked into basic economy with Delta rather than main economy if you select the economy option. There’s also a 70 Euro fee if you want to change or cancel your flight, but if you’re only redeeming 2,000 miles then it’d make more sense to effectively just throw that award booking away rather than paying that much to get 2k miles returned to you.
There seems to be some excellent award availability for multiple passengers too. For example, there are at least 8 tickets available on January 25 from Detroit to Cleveland and I wouldn’t be surprised if you find similar availability on other dates and routes too. On that search, it initially shows up as costing a total of 40,000 miles for all 8 people, but drops to 16,000 miles when you go to actually book it.
This award pricing could get even lower if you take advantage of the regular transfer bonuses that are available to Flying Blue from programs like American Express Membership Rewards, Chase Ultimate Rewards, Citi ThankYou, etc.
Something worth noting is that the month-long calendar view trick doesn’t seem to work when searching for domestic awards. For flights on Air France and/or KLM metal, you can leave the date field blank when doing an award search and it’ll display award pricing by month. When trying to do that for domestic flights in the US, it’ll state that there’s no award availability, but that’s not the case – you simply have to select a date to run the search.
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