We are less than a month away from the Miles & More loyalty program tying redemption prices to revenue prices. Will this practically mark the end of using miles for Lufthansa First Class award space?
My Fear That We Are In the Final Days Of Lufthansa First Class Awards
On June 3, 2025, Lufthansa will move to dynamic pricing on Austrian, Lufthansa, and SWISS flights. While award space will still be capacity-controlled, pricing is expected to precipitously rise, particularly for business and first class seats.
Thus far, we have been given no insight as to how Miles & More will calculate prices other than promising a correlation to the revenue price of the ticket and a warning that premium cabin longhaul seats may cost “significantly more miles.”
> Read More: Lufthansa Mocks Us As Miles & More Moves To Dynamic Pricing
I’ll be traveling to Germany soon to visit my wife’s family and the thought has continually crossed my mind whether I should take Lufthansa First Class if I can get it. After all, it’s been a few years now since my family flew in Lufthansa First Class together (a lovely journey from San Francisco to Frankfurt with a tragic self-inflicted ending) and while I’d love to fly Allegris (and I will!), I still love the “old” first class.
There’s a bit of urgency here, because my prediction (though I hope I’m wrong) is that after June 3, 2025, partners like Air Canada Aeroplan or United MileagePlus will no longer have access to first class award seats. I fear that because Miles & More says it will still tie first class award availability to the O Class fare bucket, but I cannot imagine Miles & More charging hundreds of thousands of miles for a transatlantic first class award redemption while the same flight is still available for only 100K Aeroplan miles.
Furthermore, Miles & More has already restricted SWISS First Class awards to Miles & More Senator and HON Circle members (the two highest status tiers), thus setting a precedent for the restriction of first class awards. My hunch is that Miles & More will place Lufthansa First Class awards in the same category.
With that dour prediction in mind, I’m very tempted to jump on a flight (preferably an A380 flight since I have not been on a Lufthansa A380 since before the pandemic) prior to June 3rd, even though there’s very little time in my busy schedule. I’ll be monirong award space and if by miraculous chance award space opens for the family…I’m going to grab it.
Do you think my fears are overblown and reasonably-priced Lufthansa partner redemptions will continue beyond June 3, 2025?
I can’t really identify with the substance of the post as I am far from enamoured with the LH F product, but I have been monitoring close-in *A award availability from S. America and, whilst a few months ago there was plenty coming up 3-4 days before departure (and indeed I ended up flying back from GRU in F, on Christmas Eve no less), there’s nothing on LH/LX in any class, and, to make matters worse, even Avianca seem to be restricting partner redemptions now. I do have a reservation on ET whose business class is very solid, but it’s going to be quite a detour.
I am sitting on a large balance of Avianca miles — because of a multi-person trip cancellation. Unfortunately, landing even last-minute TATL business class with LH Group airlines has become far more difficult than it used to be. I have been using them to get some Brussels Airlines business class space on long-haul flights about 7-10 days out from day of departure, but those tend to not work so well for my own travels. I too expect the situation to get worse with the changes LH has planned to the Miles & More program’s own pricing of mileage ticket travel.
But give it to the airlines to kill the goose that laid golden eggs ….. all because of corporate greed. In the meantime, squeeze your pound of flesh out of the airlines while you can — I certainly am with such sweet spots in other programs as sub-20k mile economy class mileage ticket trips from the US to Australia and 30k mileage ticket business class trips from the US to Europe.
There was a German blog that had some information on how LH will play it with the increased award costs for business and first on medium to longhaul routes – while the more flexible fares seemed to be more expensive, it still appears to be (somewhat) reasonable: https://travel-dealz.com/news/milesmore-introduces-dynamic-pricing/
@Max: Feel free to post a link to it – I’m interested in seeing how this will go.
Here is the blog post that I referred to: https://travel-dealz.com/news/milesmore-introduces-dynamic-pricing/
How come the German word “Torschlusspanik” is never used on this post?
Yes, it would have been fitting.
Literally awaiting our departure in two hours on LH 481, first class, A380. Hope it isn’t the last time. Snagged seats day 380 was announced and used my pile of Miles and More credit card miles accumulated over4-5 years. While monitoring seats in past few days because we were tempted to change departure, NO FC seats came open but good business and economy plus availability. I’m perplexed with Lufthansa. They flight out with lots of empty seats in FC and business without ever opening to anyone, even their own Miles and More customers. Maybe that will change when they increase prices?
Enjoy your trip!