Lessons: As a CO flyer stay on CO flights over water. Avoid Lufthansa.

On October 9 my wife and I were returning to BRO from Florence, Italy via FRA and IAH. We were issued boarding passes for BusinessFirst (with points) on the FRA to IAH leg (CO 047). LH 4059 was scheduled to depart FLR at 10am and indicated a 10:20 delayed departure until that time. At 10am LH 4059was canceled for “technical” reasons. We were provided food and drink coupons and kept at the gate until nearly 16:00, at which time we were put on a transfer bus to the arrival terminal, collected our bags, and given a new economy class itinerary, without seat assignments on any segment, departing from Bologna at 06:40 on October 10 via FRA, ORD, and IAH. Bus transportation to Bologna and hotel accommodations and meal at the Bologna Sheraton were provided.

Complaints
Flight cancelations happen – no airline is perfect. My primary complaint is that our class of service went from BusinessFirst on the longest leg of our journey to unassigned seats in economy, all without any consultation. It is a terrible policy to ignore ticketed upgraded seats when re-booking due to airline-caused cancelation. Points for upgrades when confirmed and ticketed are a form of payment. Some effort should have been made to work with me on a revised itinerary that would honor my ticketed trip. Clearly LH did not want to honor upgrades that were for a CO flight segment even though the cancelation that caused me to be on an LH flight was their fault. (BTW - CO didn't cover itself in glory here, either. I called CO from the bus at some expense and while they would honor the upgrade if they had space on Sunday or Monday they only showed Tuesday availability and the manager our friendly agent went to for approval wouldn't - and I quote - "extend our vacation 2 days" to let us keep the upgraded service...but that's another story.)

My additional complaint is that we were simply held hostage at the gate in FLR for nearly 6 hours with minimal communication. A few passengers at a time were called up and allowed to leave and we were repeatedly assured it would be another 20 minutes but no explanation was given as to how re-bookings were being handled. If 6 hours are required to re-book a single Lufthansa Cityline flight and Star Alliance Gold customers are among the last to be re-booked without consultation, business processes need to be changed. Also, it was obviously known that equipment issues would cause the flight to be canceled long before its departure. No effort was made to re-book us or allow us to re-book ourselves on other airlines before that time. I can imagine that on this Saturday there were not enough people to do more than handle the scheduled flights, let alone handle a canceled one, but it is clearly a bad business process that does not have a contingency for the unexpected cancelation.

Bottom line: Memories of a wonderful trip to Italy were hurt by poor Lufthansa policy and business processes. Will avoid them in the future.