We're so used to airlines making their mileage programs worse and their websites harder to use, it's hard to believe good news when we see it. But Air France/KLM just made a massive improvement that'll make it much easier to find cheaper award tickets flying Delta, Virgin Atlantic, China Airlines, and other SkyTeam partner carriers.
With easy-to-earn miles through credit card transfers, lower award rates, and (mostly) reasonable taxes and fees, Flying Blue miles are often the best way to book virtually any flight on a SkyTeam airline. But finding flights you can actually book with miles can be a chore: The trick to pull up a monthly calendar view of award availability – by leaving your departure date blank – only worked for flights operated by Air France or KLM, not partners like Delta.
Not anymore. You can now easily pull up a month-by-month calendar for virtually any flight, using that to quickly zero in on the lowest rates. Just leave your departure date blank when searching for a Delta flight from Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) to Honolulu (HNL) or a China Airlines business class redemption from Vancouver (YVR) to Taipei (TPE) and voila – a clickable calendar with a day-by-day overview of flights for each month!
This kind of easy calendar view is an absolute goldmine. Air France is easily the best way to find better Delta award deals – often for a fraction of what Delta itself will charge you in SkyMiles. But previously, you'd need to either try date after date after date with Air France/KLM or enlist the help of an award search tool to pinpoint availability on these partner redemptions.
Sure enough, that blank date search from Minneapolis to Honolulu above leads you to the cheapest flight in March. Click through to March 3, and there it is: The hard-to-find nonstop bookable for just 25,500 Flying Blue miles.
Get this: Delta is charging 65,800 SkyMiles for that exact same flight to Hawaii. This workaround saves you more than 40,000 points!
There are substantial savings like that all across the country and the globe, even – and not just on Delta but other carriers, too. This change makes it much, much easier to find them.
We first saw this expanded calendar feature sneakily crop up this summer, but only when using the Netherlands' version of the KLM website. That raised the question: Was it a glitch? Or a test that might expand?
Clearly, it's the latter. And we couldn't be more excited about it.
Flying Blue miles are the best way to book China Airlines business class, including its new route to and from Phoenix (PHX): This 13-plus-hour flight will set you back just 73,500 miles each way. And this feature makes it easy to find dates that are bookable at that rate.
It can even come in handy for pinning down Virgin Atlantic Upper Class availability. While you'll fork over fewer miles by booking through Virgin Atlantic itself, the airline now tacks on nearly $600 (or more) in taxes and fees on each one-way business class award after a nasty devaluation earlier this year. If you can find a date that works, it could be worth it to book for as low as 62,500 miles … and less than half the fees at $241 instead.
Now, this system isn't perfect. It may not work on every route for each and every airline. Sometimes, the calendar tabs for each month may display an incorrect award rate. And you may occasionally click through to a date only to find it errors out, forcing you to start from square one.
But when it works, it sure beats the daily trial-and-error process that was previously required to find these better deals via Air France/KLM.
Virgin Atlantic's website was previously the gold standard for pulling up a month or more of award availability on Delta, Air France, and other carriers. After the U.K. carrier revamped its website and nixed every trick in the book to pull up that monthly calendar, we're glad to have an alternative.
Bottom Line
Air France/KLM's website now allows you to quickly pull up a monthly calendar of award availability – not just on its own flights, but on partners like Delta, Virgin, and China Airlines, too.
It won't always work, but this is an important and infinitely helpful change. Just leave your departure date blank and pull up a month-by-month calendar to quickly zero in on cheaper – sometimes much cheaper – award rates.
