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Yesterday we brought you the details of Air France KLM’s latest Flying Blue Promo Rewards. The best offer in this month’s set by far is Business Class between Chicago and Lisbon for only 29,000 miles one way or 58,000 round trip. If you don’t have any Flying Blue miles to speak of but want to get in on this offer you do have a solution that can potentially save you a lot of money. That offer is Flying Blue’s current buy miles bonus of 75% bonus miles until November 7th. You can buy enough miles to cover the amount of miles needed for these business class flights at a price a lot less than the actual revenue ticket.
Here’s an example – we looked at Chicago to Lisbon which actually prices out at 53,000 miles round trip for business class (yes that is 5,000 less than going to Amsterdam or Paris which you would be flying via anyways) but that’s Flying Blue’s reward ticket pricing for you! On top of the 53,000 miles you have to pay 458.39 EUR in taxes and fees.
To buy miles for this trip you have to buy at the 32,000 mile level to end up with 56,000 miles (the next lower amount would leave you 500 miles shy) and those 56,000 miles will cost you 880 EUR.
Take the 880 EUR and the 458.39 in taxes and fees and you are looking at a total outlay of 1338.39 EUR or about US$1,480. So is it worth it to spend $1,480 on this business class flight? Look at what it costs to buy the same ticket outright:
The buy the same tickets would be $7,524.85! That’s $6,000 more than buying the miles and booking the same flights – it is definitely worth it! What about other airlines? The cheapest business class flights we could fine were over $2,700 – still $1,300 more than the buy miles and redeem option.
This is just one example of the value of this offer – there are many others cities you could look at for flying out of Chicago. We know Rome, Warsaw, Milan, Athens, Brussels and many other cities tend to price for less miles than Amsterdam or Paris.
