Concerto

This is the place to gripe, this is the place to rant, so here goes! I rarely have to call the Lufthansa credit card team up, but when something goes wrong and you need to talk to someone it can be incredibly frustrating and expensive waiting for an answer. They simply DO NOT pick the phone up and you are left hanging endlessly. The number I have, from the credit card website once logged in, is 069-667 888 700, Monday to Friday 08h00 to 20h00. Any suggestions of a better number, or are we stuck with this one?

Secondly, the Lufthansa website is a Beschiss, as they say in German. I could sort of understand it if this was still 2004 or whenever (but I wager the site might have been better back then than it is now). OTAs such as expedia are the clear winners here, because they offer a range of flights and connections that the airline websites don't. I fail to understand why the airlines don't address this problem.
I needed to do an open jaw, simply GVA-MAN then MAN-DUS. Expedia reveals very well priced routings via MUC (with LH flight numbers on the GVA-MUC segments which are now operated by LX) in both directions, but lufthansa.com reveals nothing of the sort, routing everything through FRA. Trying to force a routing through MUC using the multistop option yielded stupid prices in the CHF3,750 range. So, back to expedia.de it was, no chance of using one of those vouchers (which are almost unusable these days because of the 4U/EW hegemony).
Why book LH? Well, expedia (or opodo) didn't offer anything better and I suspect easyJet (GVA-MAN) and Eurowings (MAN-DUS) had high prices on those days. But most of all, I wanted to requalify for FTL for a second year running, which should prolong my status until Feb 2020.

For GVA-MAN, easyJet was offering CHF48 for a basic fare (CHF208 for Flexifare);
for MAN-DUS Eurowings was offering GBP59.99 for the Basic fare; interesting, the flexible Best fare would have been a pretty reasonable GBP119.
On expedia, the itinerary with LH was EUR182, which rose to EUR193 by the time I booked it. Not bad for 4 necessary, qualifying sectors, and not hugely much more than the fares offered by easyJet and Eurowings for nonstop flights.

oliver2002

Umm... sorry to be old school (you know, from the 1990s), but have you turned over your card and called the number shown there (printed on the magnetic stripe)

weero

It really is on the stripe ... I forgot.

Concerto

Uh...you're right, thanks. The only thing I can say is, I don't physically use the card all that often in a terrestrial way (except for car rentals) and have got out of the habit of actually handling the card. Most internet transactions I do require just the security code, which I have memorized (along with the card number and expiry date).

I wonder if that number, which ends 555, will really be any better, though. Got the thing resolved, even though they took 21 minutes to pick up the phone.

whiskey_sk

good one, I'm sure you at least made Concerto smile. I had a good laugh