Flying Blue Tricks (Part 2)
Mastering these tricks will help you to get excellent value from Flying Blue
TRAVELFLYING BLUE
Promo Rewards
If you are familiar with Krisflyer Spontaneous Escape, then you will find it easy to understand Flying Blue promo rewards. Promo rewards are offered every month, and released on the first week of the month. Promo rewards offer a 25% discount off select awards for travel on Air France and KLM. Most of the awards are based in Europe and will not be useful for Singapore-based members. However, if you happen to take a European vacation, then you may find it useful.
If you happen to book a long-haul destination that has a promo reward available, do note that connecting flights from the destination within Europe through either Paris or Amsterdam (outbound and/or return flights) are included in the Promo reward ticket.
Let me give an example. Houston is included in the promo rewards. If I'm based in Frankfurt, I can book a Frankfurt-Paris-Houston economy ticket, and that should only cost me 15000 miles. The same fare will also apply if I happen to be based in Houston, and say my final destination is London, I can book a Houston-Paris-London ticket and it should also cost just 15000 miles in economy. With a promo reward, all connecting flights within Europe (connecting via Paris or Amsterdam) are free, and no additional miles are incurred.
Unlike Krisflyer Spontaneous Escape, where you have to make a booking for travel next month, Flying Blue promo rewards have a longer travel period. You can make a booking approximately six months in advance. For example, promo rewards released in August 2024 allows you to book a travel date until 31 January 2025.
Free Stopovers
Flying Blue has a very generous stopover policy:
Stopovers are allowed even on one-way awards
Stopovers can last between 24 hours to a year
Stopovers are valid on any combination of airlines, including partner airlines such as China Airlines, as long as the origin and destination are valid for an award
The generous stopover policy opens up a ton of possibilities.
The most obvious application of the stopover policy is that I can travel from Singapore to Europe and have a stopover in Paris or Amsterdam, since all flights to Europe booked via Flying Blue will involve a connection at Paris or Amsterdam anyway. So for 70000 miles, I can book a business class ticket to London, have a stopover in Paris for a couple of days, then fly onwards to London.
Alternatively, I can pair the free stopover with a promo reward. I can book the same flight to London and have a stopover in Paris. I will explore the city of love for a couple of days, then make use of a promo reward to travel to Bergen, Norway (as shown above). I will now explore Bergen, and make my way up to Stavanger. By making use of another promo reward, I can fly back from Stavanger to Amsterdam (as shown above). I will explore Amsterdam, then take a train down to Paris, before boarding my free flight to London.
The table shows how much the itinerary would cost, excluding any other train or car rides incurred along the way from Bergen to Stavanger, and Amsterdam to Paris.
So much travel, all for a sum of 81250 miles and taxes. How can you not be excited about it?
If European travel is not your thing, just apply a stopover to the redemptions that you can make within Asia. Instead of just travelling to Osaka (shown above), why not take a break in Ho Chi Minh too :)
Do take note that you cannot request for a stopover with a promo reward.
In order to ticket an award with a stopover, you need to call Air France and book by phone. You can reach Air France (the Singapore Office) by calling +65 65771155. The hotline runs from 8am to 8pm on weekdays, and from 9am to 530pm on weekends.
Conclusion
The generous stopover policy, and promo rewards just allows you to extract so much value from the program. I hope you will enjoy these tricks that I've shared to make your trip more fun.