Thanks all. I will continue to work on this. We do have flights. I had to book something in order to nail down the land portion of the trip. We are currently holding: Econ class MSP/CDG on AF, bus class CDG/JNB on AF for 195,000 miles. I would prefer to have the ATL/JNB routing because that plane has lay flat seating in bus class. Sleeping to JNB would be wonderful.

If I have to...I will purchase tickets MSP/ATL and then use my miles for the business routing to JNB. I just don't think its fair to say that a certain mileage is based on flying from a "North American City"...when it really isn't all No. Am. cities -- only ATL.

Only a couple more years of intensive travel and then I will be finished with Delta and all other award programs. The games are just too much to bother.

I managed to get to Kenya twice in business using SkyMiles. My last visit was June 2012 and I was able to tack on a 5-night stopover in Paris. Both trips I circumvented the delta.com nightmare by flying AF and/or KLM, which at that time were always low-level awards.

I've read that this is no longer a viable workaround. Does anyone know if that's the case today?

AF has reduced their number of award seats in general. On top of that, they've created a new category of "classic" awards only available to Flying Blue members so checking the AF website is no longer a reliable indicator of availability if using Skymiles. You can check availability on expertflyer.com. I've been checking the LAX-CDG route and most of the availability is in winter.

Thanks, Patty.

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