Thought I should share a disappointing experience:

I recently booked economy class tickets for my family (party of 4) for a trip to the USA. The trip has 3 legs: 1: FRA-MCO, 2: MCO-EWR, 3 EWR-FRA.

Tickets were booked through an internet portal, but regularly issued by United Airlines.

The first leg is a LH flight (code shared with UA), second and third legs are actual UA flights.

I did a similar booking a couple years back and was quite confident that I could manage seat reservations after the booking (the booking portal could not do it). That’s how it used to work: do seat reservations for united flights on the united website, do seat reservations for LH flights on the LH website (knowing the LH booking reference).

This time, seat reservations for UA flights worked as expected (and at no additional cost) on the UA website.

When trying to reserve seats for the first leg on the Lufthansa website (well prepared to pay the required extra fee of 25 Euro per person) the system would not let me reserve any seat.

Still thinking “this must be a fixable problem” I contacted the LH hotline. Here comes the true surprise: the (very friendly) lady at the hotline told me that she could not reserve any seats either. When asking “why” she explained that she could not add a payment to that booking and that therefore she had no way of doing the seat reservation. When I asked her, who eventually could do it – the reply was “nobody”. She said that this is a known problem for bookings made through United. So in essence, when you book an LH flight through United in a booking class that requires a fee for advance seat reservations – there is NO WAY to do it.

Welcome to the world of star alliance!

The real bad thing is that this definitely used to work when LH did not have the seat reservation fees yet. Being an IT professional I can only think that somebody forgot to model a use case…

So be aware. Especially when traveling with a family with 2 small children like myself, the option for advance seat reservation was a main reason to book star alliance. Being given a random seat allocation experience at check-in I could have gotten with Delta Airlines&Co. for 700 Euro less.

Kind regards,
Marlowe