6 Unique Redemptions with Air France KLM Flying Blue

In the past few years, Air France KLM Flying Blue has become a more intriguing loyalty program for North Americans, as it’s accessible through transferrable points currencies and has been adding partners, features, and value at a time when other programs have been removing them.

As always, it’s best to consider all of the different options at your disposal when planning out a trip, and Flying Blue provides good coverage for SkyTeam airlines that are otherwise difficult to access on points.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at some unique redemption possibilities that the Flying Blue program brings to the table.

Air France KLM Flying Blue: Key Things to Know

Prior to delving into some sweet spots, let’s go over a few key features about the Flying Blue program that will help guide our discussion.

First of all, Flying Blue uses a dynamic pricing model, which means that the price points for award flights fluctuate depending on demand.

On the plus side, that means that every last seat on flights operated by Air France or KLM can be booked with Flying Blue miles. On the downside, the dynamic pricing model allows the mileage rates to fluctuate in unpredictable ways. 

For example, on one day, you might find a flight from Montreal to Amsterdam in KLM business class for 50,000 Flying Blue miles…

And on another day, the cost might be double or triple the price, or even more…

Therefore, you should aim to redeem Flying Blue miles for flights at the lower end of the dynamic range whenever possible, rather that at the higher range.

In October 2023, Flying Blue harmonized the lowest cost for awards between North America and Europe. The lowest amount of miles you can expect to pay for transatlantic flights is as follows:

• Economy: 20,000 miles
• Premium economy: 35,000 miles
• Business class: 50,000 miles

The Flying Blue program’s Miles Estimator may come in useful to set your goals for award pricing, as you can use it to find the “Starting from” prices on any city pairs.

The program recently added the ability to add a free stopover on award bookings. You can book a stopover of between 24 hours and a year, and there’s no additional cost in miles or cash to add a stopover, which is a great deal.

One downside to the program is that you’ll have to shell out some cash for taxes, fees, and surcharges, usually to the tune of around $300 (CAD) for a transatlantic flight in…