Wanted to give everyone some insight into the new process for booking award travel on LH.

I had a LGA-PHL-FCO trip confirmed in Envoy for next month, but the dates were not great and the layovers kept getting worse as US changed the flight schedules between LGA and PHL. Also, in Italy, I was planning on going to VCE and Florence, so FCO wasn't that great for the flights.

When I heard the LH agreement was in place last week, I started calling immediately looking for flights. First two days I called (maybe 2-3x per day) the agents said nothing was available.

Then, on Monday, US had availability. I was able to confirm F for the JFK to FRA flights and C for flights from FRA to VCE and MXP to FRA on the days I wanted them. Availability in F and C transatlantic for mid to late May seems to be exceptional.

The US agents on Monday said that the LH agreements only allowed for booking flights on LH metal (no LH codeshare flights such as the equivalent of express service--I think they call it Air One and Air Dolomiti).

On Tuesday, the agents said all LH flights were available for booking including the codeshares, which opens up a number of additional cities including Genoa, Pisa, and the Linate airport closer to Milan.

The F tickets were 100,000 miles each instead of the 80,000 for Envoy on US and the taxes increased from $28/ticket to $55/ticket.

For some reason, US can only issue paper tickets on LH and can't do seat assignments, but LH was able to get me seats pretty easily.

The US international agents were superb in looking for combinations and working to get everything right.

All in all, a great new option for US FF's, esp given how hard it had been to get summer award seats to Italy.