UPDATE: Flying Blue is rolling back its partner devaluation. Ben Lipsey, the Senior Vice President of Customer Loyalty at Air France-KLM who runs the Flying Blue program, posted the following message on Flyertalk:
Sorry guys, false alarm. We were made aware of some mistake fares on partners (notably 1500/4000 miles for shorthaul Y/J on DL). Being Christmas Day, we didn’t have the active resources in place to fix the root cause so we put in a temporary fix which applied a minimum price on partners. We will do our best to correct the airline partner pricing as soon as possible. Apologies for the inconvenience.
The issue stemmed from a pre-Christmas pricing glitch in which some partners were pricing as little as 1,500 miles one-way in economy class and 4,000 miles in first class. The “stop-gap” measure apparently required a pricing floor on all partner awards.
Kudos to Lipsey and Flying Blue for explaining what happened. While devaluations are fair game in any frequent flyer program, a lack of notice is not fair game. Flying Blue miles will devalue again at some future point, but let’s hope that when occurs, advance notice will be provided.
My original story is below.
As Santa brought presents to all the good children, Flying Blue delivered coal to its good frequent flyers. One of my favorite loyalty programs has ended the year on a bad note with a devaluation of partner awards, with prices rising by up to 100%.
Flying Blue Devaluation Targets Shorthaul Awards, With Partner Prices Rising By Up To 100%
As flagged on Flyertalk:
- The pricing floor for partner awards has risen, such that short-haul awards that used to be 5,000 miles one-way in economy class and 10,000 miles one-way in business class are now 10,000 miles and 20,000 miles, respectively, an increase of 100%
- Some examples:
- Domestic Australia
- Domestic Indonesia
- Intra-Asia
- Inra-Europe
- Other award pricing has risen 5-50%
- Some examples:
- Delta New York – Toronto – from 7,000 miles to 10,000 miles in economy and from 18,000 miles to 20,000 miles in business class
- Etihad Abu Dhabi to Seoul – from 26,000 to 28,000 in economy and from 51,500 to 55,000 in business class
- EL AL London – Tel Aviv – from 25,000 to 25,500 in economy and from 50,000 to 56,000 in business class
There is one case where pricing went down: Mexico City to Cancun on Aeromexico dropped from 12,000 to 10,000 miles in economy class and from 24,000 miles to 20,000 miles in business class.
What To Make Of This Devaluation
One Mile At A Time says, “I’m sure someone will be by to yell at me shortly for not having harsher words about the devaluation… The strategy in the miles & points world is easy — you take advantage of the best opportunities when they’re available, and try to be as rational as possible with your behavior.”
Meanwhile, Loyalty Lobby was far more critical, arguing, “Why couldn’t Flying Blue and Mr. Lipsey, head of the program, give a proper advance announcement of these changes, like any respectable airline would, to allow members to use their miles with the existing rates before they are devalued? It is borderline criminal and certainly highly unethical to push through changes like this on Christmas Day, but isn’t this something we have come to expect from Air France – KLM and its Flying Blue?”
I’ll take a more middle-ground position. Yes, it is correct that devaluations are a way to keep up with points inflation, and whenever we see a deal that is worth taking, we should. But yes, Ben Lipsey, the Senior Vice President of Customer Loyalty for Flying Blue, who came to Air France-KLM from Air Canada with CEO Ben Smith, should have known better.
I’ll stop short of calling it “criminal” because that’s the agreement we make when we play the miles and points game, but it is still bad policy, poor form, and undermines respect in the program.
Lufthansa can no longer devalue its Miles & More program in Germany without 90 days of notice (thanks to a court ruling after a disgruntled frequent flyer sued over an unannounced devaluation). Maybe the same should be true for Air France-KLM as well. But I did expect better from Air France and am thankful longer-distance awards were not devalued more severely.
CONCLUSION
Flying Blue has devalued partner awards, with shorthaul prices rising by up to 100%. This is an unequivocally negative change, made even more cruel because it was rolled out on Christmas Day. Devaluations are never appreciated, but are far less of a problem themselves than the lack of notice.
How are you impacted by this latest Flying Blue devaluation?
A lot of people on AFKL flyertalk knew that this was going to happen with all of the 100% bonus point sales in 2022 and early 2023. It’s a bit ironic as it was already hard to obtain reward flights on partner airlines but they made less accessible. The other thing is that FB try to make it look like reward flights with AFKL are always the base fare in miles, but it’s hardly ever the case with the exception of a couple of routes.
Sometimes Ben Lipsey is on the AFKL flyertalk subs and does take the feedback seriously, so maybe complaining loudly might cause some recourse.
Ben L has to face his own deliverables and those to whom he has to report, so I assume he had to go along with doing this and reversing it permanently isn’t going to be much of an option for some time. Unless it was a glitch, but things like this aren’t glitches.
So suddenly at the end of the year/quarter, the airline/unit needed to get the numbers to work for financial reporting purposes, work targets or bonuses, and this was the order of the day?
Not a good look that AF-KL is behaving this way. It’s like playing the Grinch Who Stole Christmas — quite literally doing this at holiday time.
Longer distance awards on partners have long been uncompetitive in the vast majority of cases, particularly when connections are involved. Check out e.g. Air Europa from BCN or LIS via MAD to S. America, I think it’s about double the AF price even though it’s a shorter distance with minimal backtracking. They’ve also devalued certain long haul journeys on their own metal over the last year – I spent 50k on a business class award SCL-CDG-ATH late last year and now you can’t find anything below 70k- but there wasn’t much coverage of that as US routes hadn’t been affected.
The lack of warning has killed any interest I could’ve ever had in building a mileage balance with them – fortunately I currently only have 19k in my account and I am not going to lose too much sleep over how much it’s worth.
Yes, agreed. I have a KL longhaul booked for 2025 at 50K and there is not a single day in which the price is now less than 77K through EOS.
One Mile At A Time says, “I’m sure someone will be by to yell at me shortly for not having harsher words about the devaluation… The strategy in the miles & points world is easy — you take advantage of the best opportunities when they’re available, and try to be as rational as possible with your behavior.”
—–
That is why the PDRK (North Korea) is such a great country?! …easy — you take advantage of the best opportunities when they’re available, and try to be as rational as possible with your behavior.”
Same with SkyPesos. (DL = DPRK, ha!)
I do check that blog with some frequency and find it rather amusing.
It’s no longer even pretending to be about travel loyalty or anything of the sort. He literally posts features about redeeming miles on Lufthansa and LATAM and explicitly states that he hasn’t even looked into awards booked with miles from their own programmes because ‘they don’t partner with transferrable points currencies’- never mind the fact that they’re the biggest loyalty schemes on their respective CONTINENTS and even offer credit cards in a multitude of markets.
I’m definitely not the biggest fan of Miles&More, but it is a huge mileage scheme and I think it’s reasonable to expect to see a blog named ‘one mile at a time’, which also mentions LH very frequently, to write more stuff about it than about Rakuten.
The decline of OMAAT has been sad to see; it’s mostly just Ben posting clickbait articles or shilling credit cards or various “promotions.” Actual analysis and reviews are few and far between.
Totally understand that everyone needs to make money but the “heart and soul” of the site is long gone.
What, you don’t like his increasingly Delta-focused clickbait purely to rile up Tim Dunn and his tons of haters (MaxPower, Julia, Never in Doubt, 600+ clones)?
The situation has since been noted as having been a temporary fix after the partner award discount glitch.
I won’t look a Christmas/Hannukah gift horse in the mouth.
Good to hear – I will update story.