My information is based on what Flying Blue agents told me and my experience with booking award tickets, although it may be the case that these are the ‘exceptional’ circumstances. Below are some examples of my reasoning, but would love to stand corrected.

First, and most importantly, the Flying Blue agent told me explicitly that cancelling my ticket will have the award ticket return to its original fare class. It would pop-up within a minute or two after cancelling, and I should continuously refresh the availability of my desired itinerary as soon as she cancelled the ticket. The ticket then indeed appeared in its original fare class again, despite it thus not being available before.

This has also been the case with previous award tickets that I wanted to change, with some agents simply cancelling the ticket and telling me to purchase a new one.

Another example is ‘reserving’ a ticket, where you reach the payment page of an award booking and the booking is taken out of the inventory for a few hours even if you do not complete the payment. It will show up under ‘My Trip’ for a few hours, but once it has disappeared, it immediately gets released back into the inventory. You can test this yourself.

Lastly I’ve also had cases of 70K miles business award tickets (cheapest one-way award price to Asia from Amsterdam) being available on dates that previously only showed availability of 300K+ miles for example.

Of course, these might have been exceptional circumstances and/or a gross oversimplification of the actual intricacies of the system. Flying Blue agents also often do not necessarily provide the correct information, so I’d love to stand corrected and understand the system more in-depth.