Several months ago I qualified for Flying Blue Gold status, the second status tier in the loyalty program of Air France-KLM. Since then I was able to get some excellent saving when booking a flight with Scandinavian Airlines, amounting to $358 worth of perks, including lounge access, priority services, free checked luggage and free extra legroom seats, all while booking a basic economy fair. At the time I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to recoup the investment, but in the end I did, and as a result I’m planning to go for another year of status. Let’s dig into the returns that Gold status was able to give me.

1. Quick refresher on Flying Blue: what is it?
2. How Flying Blue Gold status improved my flights – and saved me money
   1. What Flying Blue Gold got me
   2. How much money Flying Blue Gold saved me
   3. A few more trips to come: Flying Blue will keep saving me money! (and I will requalify for Gold)
   4. I will come out ahead of my Flying Blue Gold investment
3. Should you go for Flying Blue Gold status?
4. Summary

Quick refresher on Flying Blue: what is it?

Flying Blue is the loyalty program of the Air France-KLM airlines group, which includes Air France, KLM, Transavia, and soon perhaps Scandinavian Airlines. It has four published elite tiers, being Explorer (basic member), Silver (lowest elite tier), Gold (mid-tier) and Platinum (highest tier).

With every tier you get additional perks. For example, Silver gives you free standard seat selection, a free checked bag and priority boarding, while Gold also gives you free preferred and extra-space seat selection (from 72 hours before departure), lounge access and SkyPriority access, which allows priority check-in and baggage handling. The additional value of Platinum gets you the ability to use points to book Air France first class (La Premiere) and a dedicated phone number to call.

For most, Gold is the sweet spot, because it gives you a ‘business class’ ground experience and free preferred seats while paying for a basic economy ticket.

You then attain these tiers by accumulating experience points, or ‘XP’. You get this by flying, buying sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and donating miles. You need 100XP to get to Silver – the counter than resets to 0XP and you have a year to gain the 180XP needed to get to Gold. Then the counter resets again and you have a year to gain the 300XP needed to get to Platinum. So in total, you need 580XP in 3 years to get to Platinum.

Here is briefly how I attained Gold status:

• I reached Silver status by opening an Air France-KLM credit card that provided 100XP (the needed threshold for Silver) after spending $3000 in 3 months.
• Then, I combined flying with buying SAF for those flights to get an additional 179XP, and I donated 2000 miles for the final 1XP to get to 180XP, which is the needed threshold to get to Gold.

For the full details on how I did all this, have a look at my explanation, here.

How Flying Blue Gold status improved my flights – and saved me money

Since those prior posts, I have booked a variety of flights with SkyTeam airlines. I recently completed the first of those trips, and those Flying Blue Gold perks actually added up to a better flight experience.

What Flying Blue Gold got me

For my recent trip to Amsterdam, flying KLM there and Air France back, I received free economy comfort seats, lounge access (JFK’s Delta Sky Club, Schiphol’s KLM Crown Lounge No. 25 and CDG’s Air France Lounge at Hall M), priority check-in, and priority boarding. I would have also received one free checked bag and priority baggage handling, but I didn’t check a bag on this flight.

Those are the standard perks that you can expect at Flying Blue Gold level, though I should emphasize that the preferred or economy comfort seats are on a space available basis: you can only select these 72 hours before departure, so if the seat you wanted was selected by another passenger, you’re out of luck. You can, however, always select a standard economy seat upon booking, which is still a worthwhile benefit if you fly basic economy, which doesn’t come with any seat selection free of charge.

How much money Flying Blue Gold saved me

Let’s start with the seats. Keep in mind I booked a basic economy ticket. Ordinarily that comes with no free seat selection, though the rules on what seat you can select and how far in advance you can select it vary with airlines. On KLM and Air France, you can select a standard seat for free, and from 72 hours before departure you can select preferred or economy comfort seats as well. As such:

• On the flight from New York to Amsterdam, a standard seat would have cost $41.03, but I was able to get an economy comfort seat at a value of $106.82.
• On the flight from Amsterdam to Paris, a standard economy seat would have cost $17.73, but I was able to select a front section seat for $25.83.
• On the flight from Paris to New York, there was a plane swap from a Boeing 777 with a reconfigured cabin, to one with the old cabin. As such, there was no economy comfort section, but I was able to get one of the ‘duo seats’ at a value of $58.80.

How about lounge access? As I mentioned, I visited three lounges:

• The Delta Sky Club at New York-JFK, near Gate B31: this lounge cannot be accessed without a membership or appropriate Delta or SkyTeam Elite Plus status. So, while you could say that the access is ‘priceless’, let’s not get over dramatic.
• The KLM Crown Lounge No. 25 ordinarily costs 50 Euros to enter on a day pass, space available (about $58 at time of writing).
• The Air France Lounge at CDG’s Terminal 2E, Hall M, should be available for entry with a day pass of $75.

Then, the matter of the checked luggage. Basic economy tickets don’t get any checked luggage. While I didn’t check a bag for this short trip, for completeness sake, I would have otherwise have had to pay $75 per one-way trip. In this case, though, since I didn’t check luggage I won’t include it in the calculation.

Finally, priority services can’t be purchased, so these are difficult to factor into the calculation.

Adding up all the services I made use of that are paid, I saved $324.45. But there’s two things I want to highlight:

• The Delta Sky Club and all priority and early-boarding services can’t be purchased, so it’s difficult to add their Dollar value into the savings.
• I don’t particularly like including items that I wouldn’t have paid for if they wouldn’t have been included, and lounge access is number one on that list: as such, if you remove the savings on lounge access, I actually saved $191.45. Still, that’s a nice number!

A few more trips to come: Flying Blue will keep saving me money! (and I will requalify for Gold)

These saving are nice, and combined with aving for my trip to Stockholm in December, which I calculated to be $385, that brings me to a total saving of $576.45. However, that’s not where it stops:

• As part of our trip to Mexico City in December, my husband and I will fly Aeromexico on the outbound trip, which is another SkyTeam airline. Flying Blue Gold already allowed us to pick the front-most economy seats, bring a checked bag, receive lounge access and priority boarding.
• My husband and I will also fly to Paris for a long weekend in January with Air France, and for this my Flying Blue Gold status provides both of us with essentially all Gold perks, save for the checked luggage: only I get that. Otherwise, both of us get lounge access at JFK and CDG, we get priority services and free seat selections, with preferred and comfort options opening up 72 hours before departure.
• I will visit Madrid in March, and will fly KLM with Amsterdam. So once I again I’ll receive lounge access, priority services, and free standard seat selection at booking with a chance to get preferred or comfort economy seats at 72 hours before departure.

As you may understand from this, with all these trips I will also be able to requalify again! It has always been a wish of mine to be able to just up and leave on a short trip to Europe here and there, and that’s exactly what I’m doing now. The Gold status allows me to buy the cheapest basic economy ticket and still get a pleasant journey, minus the bigger seat that premium economy or business class would have provided.

I will come out ahead of my Flying Blue Gold investment

I previously wrote that I ‘invested’ about $700 in sustainable aviation fuel to attain the additional XP to get to Flying Blue Gold. So as you can deduce from my calculations above, we are talking about $200-300 in savings per flight, and there are another three flights coming up. This translates to a total savings of potentially over $1100 dollar, as a conservative estimate, which far exceeds my previous investments – and note that this doesn’t include perks that otherwise couldn’t be bought, such as Delta Sky Club access and priority services.

Should you go for Flying Blue Gold status?

For me, Flying Blue is working out very well. I’m able to get substantial benefits out of it that save me money in the long run, while also substantially elevating the travel experience. The next question is: is it worth it for you too?

Only you can answer that question, but I can give some guidelines:

• Firstly, there is no point in being loyal to Flying Blue if you don’t see yourself fly Air France, KLM or one of their SkyTeam partners (e.g, Delta in the US) with some frequency. Generally, if your often-frequented departure or arrival cities are SkyTeam hubs (e.g. Atlanta, Amsterdam, Paris, etc) you’ll likely fly them a lot, and otherwise you probably won’t.
• Secondly, loyalty generally becomes a moot point if you fly very little. Based on my rate of XP accumulation, I need to fly a transatlantic return flight in economy about 5-6 times per year to earn enough XP (plus sustainable aviation fuel purchases) to keep my loyalty. Is that a sustainable amount of flying for you?
• Lastly, you’ll need to figure out whether the perks apply to trips that you’re actually taking, and how much you value them. There are three things to consider here:
  • The Flying Blue Gold benefits are most useful with KLM and Air France, since they apply equally to any trip you take with them. However, with other SkyTeam airlines your mileage may vary. For example, Delta doesn’t provide free seat selection on basic economy tickets, period, and no lounge access is provided on domestic itineraries.
  • Also, credit cards that provide free lounge access, could make lounge access perks irrelevant.
  • Finally, the perks provided by Flying Blue Gold are the same benefits that you receive when you fly premium economy (minus lounge access) or business class, which means that if those are you usual booking classes, there is little to no value in being Flying Blue Gold.

Based on these guidelines, you can decide it may be worthwhile to go for status, and try it out to see how much it helps you. You would need to create a Flying Blue account, and credit any SkyTeam or Air France-KLM partner flights to it by providing your Flying Blue account number on your booking. That would be Delta in the US, or WestJet in Canada, among many others globally.

You may also wonder why Flying Blue over Delta, United or American? It’s cheaper and easier to qualify for status through Flying Blue than it is with Delta, and the points you get with Flying Blue are worth a lot more than if you’d have credited them to Delta. United and American are ina. different alliance all together so things work out a little differently there, and I plan to write a series of posts that discuss that.

Summary

Overall, my journey to get Flying Blue Gold status has worked out nicely, to the point where I’m now able to buy the cheapest basic economy ticket on Air France-KLM flights and receive an experience that is much closer to a full-fare economy experience, plus business class-esque touches on the ground (priority services and lounge access). The monetary investment that was necessary has been worth the added level of comfort, to the point where I decided to requalify for the next year.