Originally Posted by irishguy28

You need to be a bit more realistic; Flying Blue is the frequent flyer program of Air France and KLM, so routes covered by AF and KL themselves are the ones that make most sense and for which you will likely find most options offered.

Availability on "partners" will never be as good as on AF and KL themselves - for many reasons. Just because you *can* book award flights on Skyteam and Flying Blue partners, it doesn't mean that you will always be able to find some flight offered on some partner for every single city pair combination you can think of.
Particularly when you already have a preferred airline and routing - when that airline isn't AF or KL - you are possibly setting yourself up for disappointment.




KLM is not a travel agent; they are an airline. They will offer you flights on their own services, and on Air France flights, and will typically only offer flights on partners which involve connecting to/from an Air France or KLM flight and where they have codeshares to destinations the don't directly serve themselves.

It's the same for all airlines; BA, for example, won't offer you seats on Malaysia Airlines on LHR-KUL-SYD if you check the BA site for cash tickets from London to Sydney; Qatar Airways won't offer you seats on JAL's flights from London to Japan if you check the QR website for cash tickets; however, if you instead search for award seats using Avios, you may very well find these airlines and routes offered by BA and QR using Avios.

No airline is going to (unnecessarily, in their view) steer paying customers away from their own flights and onto a "partner" (which, in this context, is actually a competitor). They won't be happy to merely accept the paltry commission for making the sale; instead, they want to fill up their own flights, because THAT is how they make their money.

That's why KLM will not offer you tickets on MU when you search for journeys from LGW (an airport that neither AF nor KLM serve) to PVG. There is no earthly reason why they would want to sell you a ticket on MU, rather than steering you towards their own (AF/KL) flights.

When it's a frequent flyer redemption, however, it's s different consideration, and most airlines will only too gladly book you on their "partners" where they have award availability open to them. Partners frequently offer only limited availability and may not offer the same availability to all partners.

It's unreasonable to expect that Flying Blue will be able to offer you a seat on any particular MU flight for every future date. Flying Blue might only have access to 1 or 2 seats on any particular flight, and when Flying Blue (or some other partner) sells those seats, they likely won't ever have availability to offer more seats on that flight.


If you want to fly MU on your LON-KIX route, you should use a travel agent (a travel agent isn't running its own airline, so of necessity will want to offer you tickets on as wide a selection if airlines as possible, rather than merely acting to book you onto their own planes) or book directly with MU.