3Cforme

It could be a glitch, or it could be a holiday or other events in PAR or VCE that AF believes provide sufficient demand to fill planes. Keep checking. IME, ExpertFlyer shows bookable AF award inventory very reliably.

There are lots of routes CDG-XXX-VCE across AF, KL, and AZ. Rome, Lyon, Toulouse, Nice, Amsterdam, and Naples are all possible connecting points.

Clay Clayton

Yes, I can find flights from CDG to VCE but was really hoping to do a non-stop but may have to give that thought up. Any idea how difficult it will be to change if I book a CDG-XXX-VCE flight and then seats open up on the non-stop? I presume that would would count as a change and cost us?

3Cforme

Unless the awards use miles coming from the account of a Plat or Diamond when the change is made, there will be a fee.

Clay Clayton

and if I was either of those I wouldn't have to be relying on your expert advice!

Thanks again!

3Cforme

A narrow range of dates x six or so AF-operated CDG-VCE flights daily suggests a manageable matrix of Flight Alerts for a subscriber of ExpertFlyer.

Ticket a connection now, spend $10/month on a premium subscription and a few minutes creating alerts, then sit back and relax while waiting for your non-stop award segment to open up. Then quickly call Delta to snag that segment and re-ticket.

mtkeller

But would it be worth $150 to change from connecting to non-stop? Probably not. It appears from his comments that Clay Clayton does not share our free award change privileges.

Clay Clayton

You are right on that BUT due to all of your help and the fine advice given at the beginning of this thread, I now have on hold award seats that are almost perfect.

Last night I researched using JFK as our jumping off point hoping I could snag some low tier award seats from RDU (home) to there and onwards...but the problem was that there was no return that would allow us to get home without a stopover either in CDG (ah Paree) or JFK (eh) but both of them put us getting to our own beds in RDU relatively late on the evening before returning to work after a two week (and one day, but who is counting) vacation. But then I discovered VCE/CDG/BOS/RDU was do-able in one day...well ok, we got home at four minutes after midnight but ....that was close enough for me. Meant we could sleep in on Sunday morning and have a relaxing day at home before returning to work. Alas, no award availabilty on the CDG-BOS run....oh well...it would have been perfect...but what we got is almost perfect:

IAD-CDG-BLQ and returning VCE-CDG-IAD all in biz (except the CDG-BLQ) and without having to talk to a Delta Rep. But I am going to call tonight and see if a nice DL CSR can't figure out a way to get us into VCE. So while I hate we will have a five hour drive both ways to get to the airport, I am pleased that we will be flying on the A38 so I can cross that off the bucket list. The flight to Verona is on CityJet on a Avro RJ85 and showed up on Delta as biz seats, just not at the low award. The BLQ flight is on a CRJ. If any of you have any thoughts on one over the other I always appreciate your advice.

One thing of interest, AF flies a 747 on the CDG-BOS run and they have economy upstairs....I found that different. I LOVE being upstairs on Qantas but then there were only about 24 of us.

Anyway
THANK YOU
to everyone who assisted me in putting this together. Your friendly advice and the comprehensive advice at the beginning made this doable without spending hours on the phone. (We won't discuss how long I spend on EF, AF and DL's webpages!)

If you ever need any help with an NCL cruise...come on over to the sister board and look meup! Glad to share what I know about them like ya'll have here.

mabramovich

Hey guys,

I'm playing around with DL.com and no intra-Europe flights on AF are popping up at all. Is this a new bug?

Denolloyd

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B206 Safari/7534.48.3)

Many do not. What routes are you looking at?

mtkeller

Are you trying search by schedule? I've found that search by price returns nothing, but changing to search by schedule will do the trick.

mabramovich

Ah that did it. Thanks!

michael_v

From my experience, one should always search by both methods, because sometimes one works, other times, the other. Addmittedly, "search by schedule" works most of the time.

mnredfox

Glad it worked, these days it's the TATL flights that are a pain.

mabramovich

AF space is still ok...

mtkeller

Which routes? IAD/JFK/YUL-CDG has been much thinner lately than it used to be.