burlax

It is a popular opinion here that LH is a better airline than UA - more organized, with more robust IT system, etc. As it happens, this popular opinion turns out to be an urban legend. I had an opportunity to experience M&M recently and wanted to provide a comparison. It turns out that even in today's desperate condition MP+ is not so bad after all.

Here is how award redemptions are on LH. First, there is no way to search *A availability. LH website lets you search only for LH flights between airports served by LH. So, not even codeshares. Want to fly on partners? You'll have to use ANA or .sux or aeroplan but not LH website.

Second, availability of award seats on LH vary depending upon carrier. Apparently, you get the best availability on M&M ( even outside of the published enhanced availability for SEN and HON members ). The second best availability for LH redemptions is on .sux. The other *A get even fewer LH seats open to redemption via their respective programs.

Third, if you redeem on M&M you'll get hit with significant LH YQ. It's not as bad as BA's ( though it's hard to imagine something worse than BA YQ ), but whereas as 1K you'd pay less than a hundred dollars for NA-EU ow in F, on LH you'd be paying close to $400, most of which is YQ.

Fourth, you wouldn't be able to change the routing, only the dates of travel. If you need to change routing or add a segment, you'd have to cancel, redeposit, and rebook, which incurs fees and kisses the seats goodbye. So, no free changes or changes where you get to keep the rest of the itinerary intact.

Now, the upgrades. I was trying to upgrade a full-fare business ticket to first with LH's e-vouchers ( analog of GPU ). LH e-vouchers have one upside and lots of downsides. The upside is that there are no fare restrictions, aside from the award fare classes. The downsides are plentiful - only two vouchers a year, and it takes two vouchers to upgrade one long-haul segment. Also, although the upgrade seats supposedly come out of a subset of the award seats, it seems that LH didn't automate the upgrade process and human assistance is necessary. The upgrade cannot be confirmed immediately even if space is supposedly available. LH CSR was unable to explain why and adviced to wait until Monday when staff would be able to process the upgrade by hand. If you think UA IT is antiquated, LH's seems to be very much in the stone age.

Since upgrades are by segment, I requested a two-segment upgrade with e-vouchers from two accounts. IIRC, this can be done on UA ( you can use GPUs from different accounts to upgrade a single PNR, e.g. outbound leg and return ). On LH, this cannot be done while upgrade for one segment is waitlisted. The upgrade for the next segment cannot be queued into the system with GPUs from another account. You have to wait until the waitlist for the first segment oclears and then call again to queue the next segment. Of course, who knows whether there will be space left for upgrade on the second segment.

So, all I can say - grass isn't always greener, and, compared to LH, UA is not so bad after all.

UAPremExecflyer

Well-worn topic of discussion http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...iles-more.html and http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...questions.html among quite a few threads.