Hoping for some help here. My wife booked an Intra-European flight two weeks ago, with a February departure. In order to avoid the 16€ credit card feel she payed using our German bank account details.

Today, she received an email saying the payment failed, and we would have to pay using credit card over the phone or lose our reservation. However, this would now be a 68€ fee!! (30€ per person service fee and an 8€ credit card fee). Multiple attempts to have a phone agent waive the fee has been unsuccessful, both on their English language customer service and having a native German speaker call on our behalf. They claim no other options exist, including paying cash at the airport.

We feel such a drastic fee is completely unfair. We have confirmed with our bank that the details we provided Lufthansa were correct, that we have the money available, and that they have no record at all of Lufthansa trying to charge the account. This seems to be a fault with Lufthansa's systems somewhere that we are now having to pay a huge penalty for.

If we were to re-do the online booking, our flights are of course now much more expensive. I have researched flights on different carriers and we can get a comparable price to our original booking, but we would end up losing over 4 hours in our destination city, which we were hoping to have maximum time in.

Do we have any options with Lufthansa to lower this fee or eliminate it?