I gave up earning status on Miles about 6 years ago on FB and just do segments. Usually do about 4 per week. Book lots of flights London through Paris to French provincial and lots of Delta segments through Atlanta. Usually aim to get Platinum by May/June every year with 60+ segments but maybe only 20k-30k miles.
AF/KLM cost cutting (e.g. MiNi) makes it trickier though.

my december weekend segment run ;)
 

I just booked NUE-AMS-IST-AMS-NUE for 129€ on opodo (via kayak)
and as a nested ticket IST-FCO-CDG-FCO-IST for 118€ on govolo.it (via kayak)

IST seems to be cheap during winter time and AZ fares from IST to several european cities are very cheap as well.

8 segments for 247€ is pretty cheap :rolleyes:

If you'll be crediting to FB and the AZ fare classes are eligible for that purpose then that's a really good deal.

G

AZ fare is (1€) O-class which gives 50% mileage with FB. I wanted to go to VCE first but O class does not give miles and segements on domestic flights in Italy. International flights however are good for segment runs :D

^ Thanks for the tip. I was also looking for a few segment runs and didn't think of IST, which I now see is available (together with other destinations such as OTP) from WAW for as little as 109 GBP. Not bad indeed for 4 eligible flights.

G

Really great deal. I can't be that bothered with segment runs these days unless I really have to do them. I am hopeful to qualify next year on miles alone, if I can find some more deals over at the Premium Fare Deals forum. At the moment, there is a deal from FRA to AKL on CI for EUR1,500 or so. This Summer I did Xiamen and Hong Kong for EUR1,070 ex MAD, adding segments in Europe which booked into J and therefore yield more miles. Bearing in mind I am talking business class for the above deals.

For anyone who makes it to OTP, there is a deal from there to DXB on RO for something like EUR139 in economy. I need to look it up but it's over in the Mileage Run forum. It's a good period for deals at the moment.

speaking of business class ... air france has kind of cheap european business class tickets since a couple of months.

E.g. NUE-CDG-IST-CDG-NUE in business class will cost 565€ and earn 10.696 status miles (14.974 award miles as platinum).

these fares might be interesting when air france issues 80€ vouchers again ;)
booked via kayak with a online travel agency can bring down the price to 542€.

I think about switching to qualifying via miles next year.

Ah you've got a point there! Those vouchers show up from time to time and I am rarely able to make use of them in the time frame available. Trouble for me is, this year I am totally out of travel time, having used up all reasonable spare time for other trips. So I am going to have to try and swing this next year, when I will otherwise bounce down to Silver.

I was looking at Germany-CDG-GVA and back, and it was coming out at about 8,000 status miles (I need exactly 20,000 to bounce back to Gold). I was hoping to make it on 2 trips before Christmas, but with these figures I'd end up 4,000 miles short....which is a long way on Flying Blue. Presumably you come up with 10,696 miles on your itinerary because IST is much farther away from CDG than GVA is.

I just took one of those ex-Germany trips (from DUS) to get the final miles I needed for Gold. I went to HEL as it was most convenient for me; slightly cheaper but slightly less miles that IST. Plus I had the chance to try out Finnair in J as they are the AF code share! And yes, destinations more than 750 miles from CDG will earn you extra miles e.g. IST, HEL, LIS, OTP, ATH, SOF etc.

That's sort of a backwards way of looking at it...

It is destinations less than 750 miles that earn the extra miles. Earning is always based on the distance flown - however, when the distance is less than 750 miles, the distance is capped at 750.

For distances over 750, you get the "normal" amount based on the actual distance flown - for distances less than 750, you get (far) more than what you actually flew.

I had same idea about this WAW-FCO-IST , but the problem with AZ is with their winter schedules , they are not doing LIN-WAW anymore and prices are a little bit higher, but if you book earlier with KL the prices are the same and its faster

Flying with AF could help reach gold with segments, (ex: waw-lin-fco-auh for 500€) , but you need a lot of free time , i wanted to go to ICN , but 6h in FCO and 15h in AUH is too much for me , even ift its cheap

These fares are mostly W , so no miles , and i guess not qualifying flights too


I thought the same, europe-cdg-gva and europe-cdg-ist , you can get some really nice amount of miles , so you can reach gold for 2500€

For example , my next waw-ist-ptp will cost me 1000€ and i would get .... 12000miles, for eco prem , so no need to waste that much money.

So, just to clarify, what do you get for flights which are capped at 750 miles? I still haven't quite got how it works. It's worth looking at, this way of qualification, because I find segment running tedious. When I do it it's mostly for trips I need to make, but if I could avoid it I would aim more for nonstop flights to save time and cut down on the tiredness factor. Not very FT in spirit, but sometimes there's just not the time!

For any flight of less than 750 miles [CDG-LHR = 216 miles; LHR-AMS = 231 miles; CDG-AMS = 248 miles], the flown distance is "inflated" to 750 miles. (For the illustrated examples, you are effectively getting 3 times what you "should" get).

And then the multiplier is applied (which is 250% for business, so therefore 1875 miles each way before any status bonuses). For CDG-LHR, that means you are earning almost 9 times the flown distance. (868% to be exact). That's quite a mark-up!!!

This is where the infamous "187 miles" (though they now round it up to 188 miles) comes from. 25% of 750 = 187,5 - the lowest number of level miles that can be earned on any level/qualifying flight.

Mileage runs for Flying Blue - best routes?
 

At the moment like earlier said China airlines is the best i found to gain a lot of miles.
Fra-tpe-kul-tpe-fra can be found for 1089 euro.
Fra-tpe-fra is in prem eco which will be starting on 1st november.
Tpe-kul-tpe in business.
This trip gives platinum flying blue 31982 miles inkl. Executive bonus.
As i am normally flying eco and intra europe a great boost to my account.
I already booked this fare to akl where you can enjoy 14 hours business class from tpe for around 1499 euro and around 48000 klm flying blue miles for platinum.
Any experiences with upgrades on china airlines for plat?
I never recieved one on klm and airfrance- only on aeroflot:)

hold on - regarding status miles for qualifying/requalifying your numbers are not correct. business class on china air gives 100% in discount premium economy, 115% in more expensive booking classes. discount business class gives 115% mileage.

FRA-TPE-KUL-TPE-FRA is 15685 miles on the map.