PeteM01

I used up my meagre stock of miles, accrued over 2 years, last month on J flights to and around Kenya (AF and KQ, January 2019) ahead of this change. Award availability was quite poor at the time. Checking today, the mile price has risen by ~10% for the international flights, but dropped by ~10% for internal KQ flights. Award availability for the international flights looks much better. Not sure if any of this is related to the 1st June changes, but there certaily isn't a universal price hike going on.
With current earning rates, I would not be able to accrue even half of this amount of miles despite flying enough to maintain Plat over the next 2 years. Miles earning seems rather pointless under this new regime.

seawolf

Booked NYC-AMS-DUS J last night for 53K. It was 62.5K earlier this week. However it looks like Delta J NYC-FRA flight and it is least 70K (or even higher with a connection) whereas previously it was 62.5K.

AlicorporateUK

Without having to go through countless posts (sorry, I didn't get chance to get up to speed with the very latest on Flying Joke/Blue), is it fair to say that people like myself regularly ending up with a stash of miles to spend (and happily 'burning' them) will by far be the most notable 'victims' of the latest developments?

G

newflyer27

I don't fully agree because in my case this change is really bad. I qualify to platinum on segments but mostly Y flights. My miles stash is very low compared to many people here and it does not grow that quickly. Before this change I was usually able to play with the dates to find award tickets even during high demand period at reasonable prices but now it is far more difficult and the search feature they removed is just a pain in the....
I know I am probably not the target for FB as I don't bring that much at the end but this is affecting many people like me who travel a lot on a lower budget and in Y.
I guess everyone is in a way "badly" affected buy this change.

ranskis

Actually if you travel a lot in cheap Y usually, the earning side might be positive for you. 200 EUR tickets including 50 EUR of taxes now earns 600 miles or even 1200 miles as platinum, before it was more like 376 miles or double as platinum if flights are direct.
On the burning side, we are all loosers, even for those who fly on 5000 EUR long haul biz tickets: there is no way you can plan on getting one award or the other, even if the search feature was still activated. The amounts of miles required vary so much, there is no way to plan how much an award would cost, and work your way to earning the miles with flying, amex, hotels, promos etc. since by the time you get the miles needed, the award levels might have changed dramatically. Perhaps if we burn on partners only the levels remain stable and I am not even sure how that works.

AJCNL

Looking at my potential spending, AMS-AKL seems to have increased from 125000 to 144000 for a one way in C, with less availability shown, but Y in Europe seems cheaper with plenty of AMS-EDI for 6000 or BIO for 8000.

Zembla

Xandrios

I expected the award miles to reflect the fare price in Euros by now. But this is not the case at all. Looking at a few different flights (same class, same route) the value per mile (Fare price / required miles) varies greatly. For economy I see the value per mile between 0.3 to 0.6 cents.

But even stranger - there are multiple flights per day. In business the fare for each of these flights is the same (576 euro per leg). However the miles required for an award is not the same, and differ about 15K between the flights.

To me this indicates that there is in fact no direct relationship between price in euros and price in miles. They are still doing shenanigans to the award prices. Just that now they have carte blance to increase prices wherever they see fit.

bodory

How could this could not possibly be a glitch?

newflyer27

your example is not applying to me at all but even if it did do you really think 200 miles more per flight is gonna increase my stash of miles?! Actually in most of my European flights that I usually buy less than 200 euros, I am now getting less miles than before. Let's not even talk about my LH flights which drastically decreased in terms of miles earning, almost halved compared to before.
​​​​​​Anyway., as you said we are almost all losers I guess, each one In a different way.
As for the search feature that used to show the calendar, i am o think it was a great tool to see the whole month awards and plan accordingly if you have flexible dates. I hope they put it back quickly.

newflyer27

Double post by error.

Goldorak

roimaaf

Here's an interesting quirk that I found in my research of the new pricing structures. I've always found that FB awards on DL metal have been really good value for me because Delta doesn't charge fuel surcharges on Flying Blue tickets.

Though I noticed that since the new "system" has been implemented, the tax bill for Delta-only flights ex-USA has gone down to just €8.66 from about €20 ish. Sure they require more miles than AF or KL metal but 8 Euros versus 50 to 100 I'm quite intrigued... To an extent of course 😅

LAURENTD

seawolf