Goldorak

Among the avgeeks of this FT community, yes sure. But this will remain extra marginal outside our small world. The immense majority of fliers do not know this for revenue tickets, so why would they know for award tickets ?

Of course. But I doubt you'll do it every time because of the hassle to have to position yourself in another station and having to book separate positioning flights and eventually one or 2 hotel nights at this station...the price difference has to be important taking into account those extra costs.
I do this personally once or twice a year fo some personal (revenue) long-haul trips in premium cabins. May be I will do it also now for awards, but this will certainly not be my routine for the reasons I have explained + the additional time it takes before and after the trip.

NickB

Just a point of terminological clarification: POS refers to point of sale of the ticket, not to point or origin of the trip. Thus if I buy from KL in China a ticket from ATH to AMS, the POS will be China, not ATH. I do not think that the POS has any relevance here.

ranskis

With AFKL, the POS has relevance for availability of booking classes, which should then be relevant here due to this dynamic award pricing.

NickB

It has but that is not what the OP was talking about. POS affects the availability of a booking class. The OP is talking about differential pricing. There is no such thing as POS differential pricing with AFKL, The only thing there is is POS differential availability.

If the dynamic pricing of award tickets are based on class availability, it could very well be that there are POS-induced variations on award pricing too. This, of course, assumes that awards are priced and issued locally rather than centrally. I do not know whether this is the case.

Xandrios

You are absolutely right NickB, the term POS is not right for what I wanted to describe. I indeed meant the point of origin. Of course, often POS and point of origin are the same, but that is not necessarily always the case.

The broad point remains the same though: With cash fares there are a bunch of methods to fit the price of a ticket to the majority of pax flying that route - and that seems not to be the case for these awards. While the city pairs do define the pricing, the direction between those cities (Which of the two cities one originates from) does not affect price (While it does for cash tickets). AMS-ATH is perhaps a great example for that as the AMS market is quite different from the ATH market. Cash fares reflect that beautifully: Originating from ATH is about a third cheaper than when originating from AMS.

If there will be a set conversion rate between cash<>miles for these award tickets, this may mean that the most expensive direction will be used to base the award price on. Which would be a pity (and not fair to the people originating from the other direction)..

Wunk

Slightly related. It does seem KLM has somewhat caught up with hidden city round trip tickets, for a lot of tickets the return leg can't go over AMS anymore where you skip the last leg, it'll add full AMS-based pricing when you select a flight that has Schiphol as an intermediate return hub that you'd want to exit at.

NickB

All in all, it seems to me that the relationship between cash fares and award costs is not linear but rather of a a broad fuzzy logic nature, with plenty of exceptions and what would look like oddities if we were looking for a direct parallel. This has already been the case to some extent since they moved away from unitary award pricing towards a more flexible system in a few years ago. It looks like this one is just one step further towards fine tuning award costs between city pairs rather than regions but perhaps not a revolution.

To add another data point, between LON and Provence-Cote d'Azur,, LHR-MRS is cheapest at 8K, followed by LHR-NCE at 9K and LHR-TLN at 10K. This does not quite match up with cash fares. Typically, cheapest theoretical cash fares are virtually identical. As to 'real life' fares, TLN is too recent an introduction to judge but, anecdotically, it is IME on balance a little easier to find cheaper flights to NCE than MRS out of LON.

danfl44

The minimum price for a J award ticket between EU-US seems to be 53K miles. There are some big differences, like LAX-DUS = 72k and LAX-PRG = 53k, probably both going through AMS.
I hope the lowest prices are reasonably well available. I am also curious if we are going to see any difference in surcharges.

tigertanaka

It will be interesting to see what happens with the changes, currently the classic award prices are ridiculous versus paid prices. I am looking at flying MUC-CDG, one-way in September.

Cash price: €110.57 (and as a Gold I will get 444 FB miles credited plus a mighty 5 XPs)
Award ticket: 15,000 FB miles and €36.57 in taxes

Ignoring the XPs, the value per mile is €0.0048 each. OK, so this is better than spending my miles in the FB store but on competitive routes like this why would anyone use their miles if they are getting less than 0.5 €c each?

brunos

As often, you are making an important point. Let me paraphrase a bit.
One aspect, extensively discussed above, is the itinerary itself, and therefore the point of origin. On revenue tickets a LHR-CDG-HKG ticket is cheaper than a CDG-HKG ticket. The same seem to now apply to awards. But as Goldorak pointed out, the difference can be huge for revenue tickets in premium classes, but seems low for minimum-miles award. Hence not worth the positioning effort, at least for the minimum-miles levels.

Another aspect is the point of sale (POS). For revenue tickets, availability of fare buckets varies across POS for the same itinerary. AFKL retain the same pricing and applies an exchange rate if needed. BUT, prices can be quite different on different AF national websites (different POS) because fare bucket availability is different. This has been amply discussed in other threads. The interesting question is whether a similar methodology will apply to awards. If so, get ready for POS and POO hunting.

NickB

Even if there is, it is by no means certain that 'hunting' will be possible, in that it is not clear that you can get a local POS to issue an award ticket. If I am a French resident with a FB account, can, say, AF Ecuador issue me an award ticket or is the ticket always issued by FlyingBlue in France on AF paper (and therefore a France POS)?

brunos

Indeed.

bodory

Very unlikely they will discriminate soon by PoS as shifting from fixed to flexible award scheme is already quite a challenge for them.

Goldorak

Goldorak

I'm curious to see what it will be tomorrow (in the new system) knowing how crazy its can be with the current one in its last day of life
I was looking for a PAR-MPL round trip in may for a weekend. At the times I want/need, it is quite costly (320 EUR ). I never use miles for short- and medium-haul but by curiosity I looked at award tickets for the same flights....They want 50,000 miles + 50 EUR taxes
WHAAAAT ?????
when you think that 50K is "normally" what they ask for France-USA round trip in Y.
I will look tomorrow with the new dynamic redemption scheme.