The background
When researching options for our 2018 vacation trip in November last year, I somehow stumbled across quite a good Lufthansa first class roundtrip fare from Kuala Lumpur to Frankfurt (at least as good as Lufthansa usually gets). While I don’t exactly know anymore why, it came to my mind that this fare could actually be something to include into a mileage run. And even though I’m actually not really a fan of completely useless flying, I found the idea of doing something this crazy at least once quite intriguing, and decided to at least try to put together a run for LH’s Senator status for January or February. I mean, in this case, I wouldn’t have to struggle with all the hassle that is associated with holding silver status (FTL) with LH and gold status with Aegean for the next several years, let alone the constant planning required to make sure I requalify for both every or every second year. If all had worked out well, this would have granted me Senator status for almost three years, followed by an additional two years holding FTL status (the „soft landing“ mechanism of Miles & More). However, due to a heavy workload towards the end of the year, I lost track of the plans and, at some time, decided to just forget about it.
However, with the rumors of major changes to the Miles & More status levels coming up in early 2018, I thought it might now be worth pursuing the entire thing again. Well, as I’m usually not someone who needs lots of time to decide about „go“ or „abort“, I quickly went to the research stage again and decided to try to book something that could be done within a few days per „direction“ and that would ideally drop me off or pick me up in Zurich, where I’m already commuting to once per month (hence the title of this report), so I could actually make at least some slight use of the otherwise unnecessary trip. Unfortunately, due to other assignments, it turned out that it wasn’t possible to do everything with a single visit in ZRH, so I ended up splitting the „outbound“ and „inbound“ trip to two weekends in March and April, while the „inbound“ part of the trip would actually start in Zürich after my monthly week there. This also helped to satisfy the minimum stay requirement of 6 nights for the LH fare out of KUL, and would probably make the entire trip less stressful.
The first thing I needed to decide is how to actually get to KUL without overstressing the budget. In order to position from Europe to Indochina on LH group, there are basically only two viable options, and that would be Bangkok or Singapore. And as one of the best departure airports (save special offers, of which SWISS has had quite a lot recently) in order to go from Europe to Asia in premium classes is Amsterdam. And tally ho, the really good SWISS first class fare from AMS to Asia in booking class A was still available, even though I already took advantage of that for last year’s holiday trip. After playing around with different date combinations for several hours, I managed to find availability for both AMS-BKK-AMS on LX as well as for KUL-ZRH-KUL on LH. The only open question was how to get from BKK to KUL. As I was planning a *A mileage run, Thai would have been the obvious option. There’s just one problem: TG only has 3 flights between BKK and KUL (vv.) per day, and taking them would have required me to add an additional night in BKK or KUL which would have (slightly) increased the cost of the journey, and, of course, the timeframe needed to complete it. Additionally, as the flights were of course booked on separate tickets, I wanted to have enough buffer between flights so I could still manage to make my way back home even when missing a flight and having to take the next one. After some thinking, I finally decided to book the BKK-KUL-BKK transit on Malaysian, more or less as „dead“ segments.
Booking the LX roundtrip was easy as usual, but for some very strange reason, Lufthansa wouldn’t sell me the KUL-SIN-FRA-ZRH ticket for the price that was shown in Matrix. After some playing around with LH’s multi-stop booking site, I discovered that the final leg FRA-ZRH was the culprit: this flight was operated by SWISS (even though the fare rules clearly stated that LX segments were allowed), and as soon as I changed it to the next one that was operated by LH, the price was right.
The last question that remained was how to get from DUS to AMS. As I didn’t want to take the afternoon flight from AMS to ZRH which makes for a bit of a tight connection onto the longhaul, I already needed to be at Schiphol around 8:30am. I could have taken the train, but then I would have had to add another night in AMS, so I decided on booking two economy light flights on KLM between DUS and AMS.
All in all, this left me with the following itinerary:
The „outbound“
DUS-AMS on KLM Embraer 175, Economy class
AMS-ZRH on SWISS Airbus A321, Business class
ZRH-BKK on SWISS Boeing 777, First class
BKK-KUL on Malaysian Boeing 737, Business class
KUL-SIN on Singapore Airlines Airbus A350, Business class
SIN-FRA on Lufthansa Airbus A380, First class
FRA-ZRH on Lufthansa Airbus A320, Business class
The „inbound“
ZRH-FRA on Lufthansa Airbus A320, Business class
FRA-SIN on Lufthansa Airbus A380, First class
SIN-KUL on Singapore Airlines Airbus A330, Business class
KUL-BKK on Malaysian Boeing 737, Business class
BKK-ZRH on SWISS Boeing 777, First class
ZRH-AMS on SWISS Airbus A321, Business class
AMS-DUS on KLM Embraer 190, Economy class
This itinerary would also give me the opportunity to visit a few airport lounges (including the brand-new SWISS FCL Concourse A in ZRH, that is just going to open one day too late to visit it on the outbound journey) and experience some of the world’s most famous business and first class products. I quite like the idea that somebody compared the experience of such a trip
to a cruise ship journey, where the time on board is actually the primary purpose of the trip. At least this thought makes me feel a bit less weird when thinking about the upcoming journey.
In the weeks between booking and flying, it turned out that for once, I seemed to have hit the spot on some special occasions. During the outbound, the SWISS Seafood Connoisseur Experience will still be running (after missing it twice by only a few days each during the last two years), there’s a chance that I might get a chance to see the Zurich FCL A after arriving back from the first part of my trip, and last but not least, it turned out that SQ will be testing their new Boeing
787-1000 on the SIN-KUL flight of the return part of the journey. A few days before departure I also realized that the AMS-ZRH flight would be operated by a CS300, another plane that I have never flown on so far. Looks like I finally managed to pick just the right dates and flights in order to provide a particularly interesting trip report.
Parts of this reportWhat will be coming up
I’ll try to post the individual parts of the report as promptly as possible (I’ll probably have enough time during the trip), and then link to the individual parts here. Among others, you can look forward to:
- SWISS First Class, a long daytime flight
- Lufthansa First Class
- Singapore Airlines Boeing 787-1000 (Business Class)
- Lufthansa First Class Terminal Frankfurt
- Malaysia Airlines Golden Lounge Kuala Lumpur (newly refurbished)
- Singapore Airlines SilverKris Lounge (Business) Singapore