There is currently a prefect storm brewing over at Air France/KLM, and not in a bad way. Sometimes, finding great value in award flights means building up your points balance and striking at the right time. And currently, a confluence of events is making it really cheap to fly to Europe, with lots of availability. Let's take a look.
Transfer bonus
Presently, Chase is offering a 25% bonus when transferring points from Ultimate Rewards to Flying Blue, the award program of Air France/KLM. This means those flexible points you have been earning through sign up bonuses and credit card spend will now go further. If a flight requires 50K points, you could now transfer 40K points from Chase to Flying Blue to book that 50K flight, a delicious points savings.
Flying Blue Deals
Flying Blue runs monthly promos, offering sales on award flights both within Europe and long haul flights. They release these promos every month with new city options. Typically there are 1-2 cities in North America you can fly to Europe from on sale, but this April, there are several options. You can book to/from the following cities by the end of April for travel through Sept 30 (although I see low points flights from some cities all the way through early 2024).
To Amsterdam via KLM
Washington (IAD)- starting at 12750 points one way
Austin (AUS)- 18,375
Minneapolis (MSP)- 18,750
Salt Lake city (SLC) 22,500
To Paris via Air France
Atlanta (ATL)- starting at 10500 points one way
Detroit (DTW)- 11,250
Boston (BOS)- 12,750
Denver (DEN)- 15,000
Houston (IAH)- 15,000
These awards can be booked at either Airfrance.com or Klm.com and are for economy class. Like I said, even past September, I am seeing great prices in points, even if not as low as the promo offering. Here are a few examples:
This is a round trip flight from Atlanta to Paris in August for 21K points +$228 in taxes/fees (16,800 with Chase transfer bonus).
Austin to Amsterdam for 36,750 (29,400 with Chase) +$232
Detroit to Paris even past September for 30K (24K with Chase) +$228
You can even book beyond just Paris, here's the above Detroit to Paris flight to Rome instead for only 17,500 pts.
Notes to consider
You need to set up a free Flying Blue account first, before you can search for award flights.
You can transfer points from Chase (only one with current 25% bonus), Amex, Citi, Capital One, and Bilt, making Flying Blue a very popular program.
Kids ages 2-11 get a 25% discount on award flights, so in combination with the Chase promo, kids can fly for a deep discount.
The Air France and KLM websites can be very glitchy and frustrating. You may want to call Flying Blue to confirm the points required for your itinerary before transferring, because once your points are in Flying Blue, there is no going back.
On that note, you can search at Air France by calendar view. Once you log in and choose "Book with miles," enter your cities but leave the dates blank. This will come up with a monthly calendar view, but don't take the results as fact, clicking on a date may not give you the same advertised point total. In fact, the calendar view may be off by a whole day.
Check the cancellation policy, but typically there is a 50 euro fee per person to cancel, so the program is not as flexible as US carriers.
Conclusion
This is why I advocate building up diversified, flexible points. If you had been focused on building up United points instead of Chase points, this opportunity would pass you by. Chase points can still transfer to United 1:1 but then when a sale pops up at Flying Blue, you can put those points to work for you. Getting a family of 4 to Europe for potentially 120K points round trip is incredible. So whether you were planning to go to Europe this year or not, it may be worth getting serious about now with these promos.
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