irishguy28

It was mentioned today in another thread by Ben Lipsey, but I think this deserves a thread of its own for greater visibility.
As of today, the change/cancel fee is waived on Flying Blue award tickets booked by FB Platinum members.

https://www.flyingblue.com/en/progra.../tier-benefits

SilverChris

A good improvement for sure, bringing FB Plat more in line with its peers.

But I wonder why they still pretend there's an option to "change" award bookings

atflyer

Nice perk for sure!

f4free

Lovely!

planes&trains

With the talk of the redeposit fee going up, this sounds that much sweeter.

Xandrios

This is great news! It is limited to award tickets only (Having this applied to regular AFKL Light/Standard tickets would be totally awesome..) but that may not be within FlyingBlue's control. The award tickets are issued by FB themselves.

So..how is this going to work in practice? The Matrix mentions something about "Waived offline fees" for Ultimates only (Implying that this does not apply to Platinum). Does this mean that if I (Being Plat) were to call the PSL to cancel an Award they would charge a service fee (other than the 50/70 euro change fee)? Is the process of cancelling/changing award tickets possible online?

I believe that we can conclude from this new benefit that the Light/Standard/Flex fare structure currently used for paid tickets are likely not going to make it across to FB. This new benefit would probably not be introduced right now if they were planning to change the award fare structure into those light/standard/flex types. Which is something that I was fearing but I'm thinking that's much less likely now.

newflyer27

My understanding is that the offline fee(20 euros I believe) is the fee you pay when you book by phone, be it an award or cash ticket. that is waived for Ultimates. Usually it was supposed to be waived only if there was some technical issue online and you had to call to finish the booking.

For awards my understanding from a call to PSL is that a platinum/ultimate have to call to cancel an award for free because doing online is not gonna be free when handled by some other team.

strikerbird

I find this very interesting, especially for us with Flying Blue Platinum for life who are not after the XP hunts anymore.

This potentially makes all economy tickets fully flexible. The price to buy miles when Flying Blue have discounts are 80 cents per mile. This will bring the price of buying miles to then use on award tickets roughly the same as buying a revenue ticket. The difference is the fully flexibility. Why would we ever buy a revenue ticket again?

Sincerely,
SB

Xandrios

Well this is only true if you are able to purchase miles for 0.8 cent/mile (Which is rare) and you find award availability at the lowest fare. Which is quite rare nowadays. So the reason for purchasing a paid fare... not having to pay double just because the cheapest fare group has been sold.

irishguy28

Because if you go 5 years without earning any XPs, you may face closure of your account, even as a PfL, under the T&Cs

Oxymore

The wording isn't fully clear to me - does that mean that if as a Plat I book a reservation for myself and another passenger, both would benefit from free changes? Or would I still have to pay one change fee?

strikerbird

when you buy miles for 0.8 euro; then you will have more miles activity in your account…?

HalconBCN

Previously the fee was 50 euros- much lower than changing a revenue ticket. And I'm pretty sure most PFLs were not buying miles to buy award tickets to gain that bit of extra flexibility.

irishguy28

Any Platinum can cancel *any* award made from their account without paying a fee.

orbitmic

I suspect you mean 0.8 cent/mile because 80 cent/mile would make your tickets outrageously expensive. Conversely, 0.8c/mile is certainly not a usual rate.

Secondly, of course, we all know that with dynamic pricing cost of award tickets can vary roughly between 1-10 and 1-15 depending on the route, with a far steeper curve than for paid tickets, and when you get the higher rates, that is a lot more than flex paid tickets again, This means that quite frankly, if you need to change your flights late, the issue is never so much the change fee as the vast different in miles you'll often need at the last minute.

All that to say that I think you might be reading a bit more into it than I do. Personally, and as another PfL, I certainly don't think that this will in any way affect my arbitration between buying paid or award tickets when flying with AF-KL. It is mostly a nice gesture which I arbitrate and may on the other hand affect my choice to get my award travel from AF KL rather than, say, BA which has also given me fee less changes and cancellations for years.