Flying Blue is a really useful award program for lots of reasons—it’s easy to earn their miles because they’re transfer partners with all the major banks, they usually have a solid amount of economy saver award availability to and from Europe, and kids get a 25% discount on award fares. I find Flying Blue to be a great option for flights for my family most of the time, and the only shortcoming I’ve found more and more in recent months is the utter lack of availability of business-class saver award flights from anywhere in the Western US/Western Canada. Flying Blue lowered the amount of miles required for a saver award seat to or from Europe last year down to 50,000 miles one-way, but it seems like the flip side of that decision was that they’re just not making many flights available anywhere near that points level anymore. If we have the miles available, I’d definitely prefer to fly business class!

The frustrating part

If you’re like me and you search for Flying Blue saver business-class awards betwen the western US and Europe multiple times a week, you’ve also noticed that these saver awards have become pretty rare. (And by “saver,” I mean business class for fewer than 60k miles per person, one way.)

For example, here’s what I see when I search for all the West Coast airports that seats.aero includes in its “WST” search code (LAX, SFO, SJC, SEA, SAN, PDX, DEN, YVR, LAS, SLC), plus PHX, which got a nonstop flight to CDG on Air France earlier this year (nonstop routes are shown in green and connecting routes are shown in blue):

That’s eight saver-level business-class flights TOTAL to either CDG or AMS over the next year from ten major western-North-America airports that Flying Blue carriers fly to.

That’s pitiful!

And if you look at flights that include a connection after a stop at CDG or AMS (i.e., the ones listed in blue, not green), it’s not any better.

You could fly from Las Vegas to Manchester on two days or to London or Paris on one additional day each, and that’s it. For the entire YEAR from anywhere west of Dallas.

The interesting part

But something interesting happens if you don’t put in Europe as your destination and you select Africa.

Suddenly there are lots of great saver business-class flights from LAX, Denver, San Francisco, and even Seattle (which hardly ever gets any good nonstop saver business seats) connecting in Paris and ending in Tunis!

And when you look at the details, you can clearly see that these flight listings have you flying from the US airport to CDG in business class on Air France.

And confirming the details on Air France’s website, we see the same thing.

So by adding a connecting flight from CDG to TUN, now it’s suddenly an option to fly from the western US to CDG in business class at the saver award level. The seats on those US-to-CDG flight segments are available, but Flying Blue just won’t release them at the saver level unless you fly where they want you to, which apparently is Tunisia. (And if you’re curious, there’s also saver business award availability from the US East Coast to Algiers, Casablanca, and Marrakech, so those are also options.)

And if you’re wondering hey, what about trying this with KLM, I’ll stop you right there. KLM doesn’t fly to North Africa and I don’t see anything similar with their flight options.

So what’s going on here?

We know to expect weird pricing inconsistencies like this for cash fares, and it’s weird but not surprising that an airline would have pricing inconsistency for award fares, too. Why would an airline program charge fewer miles for an award itinerary that includes Paris and Tunisia when it’s charging more for an itinerary just to Paris?

Well, part of the answer is that the Flying Blue award map counts a lot of North Africa as part of Europe. So Flying Blue doesn’t think it’s giving you an extra continent as part of your award itinerary; you’re just going to really, really southern “Europe.” And just like how they don’t charge more if you’re flying to Rome instead of Paris, they don’t charge more if you’re flying to Tunisia instead of Paris.

So … what can you do with that information?

Option 1: Hello, Tunisia

If you’ve always wanted to go to Tunis, congrats! You’re in luck, and you can fly business class all the way there for the same saver-level award price that Air France charges to just get to Europe, even though you’re really tacking on a whole additional continent to the ticket. Tunisia is on my list of places to go at some point, but right now we have all our travel planned out for the next year and have no flexibility with kids in school, so this isn’t useful to me right now. But maybe it is to you! There are a bunch of 4- and 5-star beach resorts near Tunis that look gorgeous, and there are markets, Roman ruins, Star Wars filming locations—tons to see within easy distance of the capital.

Option 2: Hello, Paris stopover

The first thing that popped into my head when I discovered all this Tunisia availability was that if you really just want to end up in Paris, maybe you could just sort of eventually drop the Tunisia segment. A back-door way to force Flying Blue to let you fly in business class to Europe, if you will.

So if you love the idea of a trip to Paris but aren’t looking for a trip to Tunisia, what about calling Flying Blue to book a free stopover on your award ticket to Tunisia over the phone? You can book a stopover in Paris and set it up so that the CDG-TUN leg doesn’t happen for several months, and in the meantime either ponder Tunis some more or just hope that eventually there’s a schedule change and that gives you a totally legit reason to ask for the CDG-TUN leg to be canceled and your miles refunded.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I had a flight booked in the past two or three years that didn’t have some kind of schedule change, so the odds of this happening are pretty high if you ask me. (And you can just book some other award ticket home from Paris. Unless you’re moving there or something.) I don’t think there’d be any issues with the timing, either, because neither France nor Tunisia has any strict visa requirements that you’d have to work around.

Option 3: Hello, pushing boundaries

If you don’t want to have to call Air France to book an elongated stopover in Paris, you could theoretically try the equivalent of skiplagging, but for award flights, and just . . . not fly on the CDG-to-TUN leg.

What could happen? Not really sure. Airlines are usually really opposed to skiplagging with cash fares, but with award fares, do we really know? Do people wake up one day in Paris and just miss their flight to Tunis? Surely that happens from time to time.

Now, would I want to skip flying an award segment with a loyalty program I really value more than once? Probably not; that seems kind of risky. But would I try it just once?

So this is a choose-your-own-ending kind of situation. The business-class saver award availability from the western US to Paris is out there. It exists! You might just have to do some finagling to be able to take advantage of it.

What do you make of this situation? Let me know in the comments!

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