A New Calendar Trick to Find Cheaper Delta Awards via Air France/KLM

Ninety-eight times out of 100, the best way to book a Delta flight with points isn't using Delta SkyMiles but turning to a partner airline's mileage program – namely, Air France/KLM Flying Blue. Those miles are infinitely easier to earn by transferring credit card points from all the major banks, and you'll need fewer of them, as the airlines both charge a fraction of what Delta often asks for.

But finding Delta flights you can actually book using that workaround can be tough. Old tricks to pull up a month-long calendar of award availability – instead of a tedious day-by-day search for bookable Delta flights – have steadily been stamped out. Air France and KLM’s handy calendar view only works for its own flights – not when searching for Delta and other partners.

We just found a glorious exception. By heading to KLM's Netherlands homepage (at KLM.nl) instead of the normal dot com, you can leave the date blank on your search for Delta awards and trigger a month-by-month calendar view of flights. That's absolutely invaluable to quickly find the Delta flights you can book using Flying Blue miles.

Normally, you'd have to search one day at a time, hoping to eventually strike a hit … or else error out. But by leaving the departure date blank, this search for Delta flights from Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) to Mexico City (MEX) suggests there might be availability from February onward – including several dates in February like Feb. 1, Feb. 8, Feb. 9, Feb. 18, and Feb. 22.

Click one of those dates and sure enough, there it is: The nonstop Delta flight is bookable for 14,000 miles each way.

And get this: Delta is charging more than double the SkyMiles for that exact same flight.

This new trick made it much easier to find a way to book for a fraction of the miles. It's a real godsend – and, hopefully, a feature that will stick around (or even expand to other sites) rather than something that gets stamped out soon. Then again, airlines' track record of making their websites worse for finding award deals is well-established at this point.

As it stands, we find this Dutch calendar trick works best when searching for Delta flights within North America (including out to Hawaii), South America, or over to Asia – just not Europe, sadly. It can also come in handy when searching for Virgin Atlantic business class availability as well as a handful of other partner carriers.

How to Get a Calendar of Cheaper Delta Awards

Much like Air France and KLM's websites themselves, this new trick isn't perfect. You might see some wrong dates or even wrong award rates. Your search may still occasionally error out altogether.

But it sure beats the hunt-and-peck mentality otherwise required to find cheaper Delta award tickets.

To start, head for KLM.nl. Don't worry, you don't need to speak Dutch to make use of this loophole: Just click the location in the upper right and select English.

From there, it works just like any other award search. You'll want to click “Book with Miles” and then log into your Flying Blue account. As an example, let's search for the coveted Hawaii nonstop from Minneapolis to Honolulu (HNL), where award availability is like a needle in a haystack. Remember: Leave your departure date blank!

Thrifty Tip: When using miles, it's almost always better to search for (and book!) one-ways separately.

Rather than erroring out as it normally has when searching for partner-operated flights, you should pull up a calendar. The lowest mileage rates in the tab for each month should be the nonstops we're looking for, while others likely involve a connection. By the looks of it, nonstops are bookable between October and December.

November in Hawaii sounds nice, eh? Click that month and exactly one date shows up at the 25,500-mile rate we're looking for: Nov. 28.

Click that date and voila – there it is! With just a few dates actually bookable at this rate in a six-month span, imagine how much time it would have taken to stumble upon this deal. With this calendar trick, we found it in just a few clicks.

For as much time as this saves, it saves you far more miles. Delta is charging more than 76,000 SkyMiles for this exact same flight – triple the amount you'll pay through Flying Blue!

Again, this system isn't perfect. I also tried to scope out December flights and clicked through to a date also showing 25,500 miles only for that search to error out and bring me back to the calendar.

Now that Virgin charges close to $600 in fees for a one-way in business class to London-Heathrow (LHR), this calendar is also useful for finding award availability through Air France/KLM. While it'll cost you more miles, you'll pay less than half that sum in surcharges using Flying Blue miles instead.