Originally Posted by
Knobbgb
The LH group are notorious for not really upholding the 'spirit' of the alliance, especially for the lower fares. I now don't even bother to look at them unless I really want to fly LX into LCY. They don't give a checked bag on the cheapest fares either and I read something about them trying to deny lounge access to pax on other carriers' cheapest fares, although I've never had problems.
Now SAS is gone, there are pretty slim pickings for points-earning fares in Europe. I was pleasantly surprised when I recently booked a super-cheap LOT flight and found I'd get 25% when I expected nothing. LHR-WAW-ATH will actually earn me MORE than the cheapest P-bucket direct flight with A3 and was a LOT cheaper (see what I did there?)
.
I've been waved right on on non-rev tickets to LH lounges with my Star Gold card
, never had any issues there. But then of course I've seen people on paid domestic J in the US and the united lounge agents have to tell them they're not admissable.
I just recently flew OTP-WAW-MXP on LOT on their cheapest fare (Q) and got 500+500 miles to OZ. It was not only cheaper than LX/OS but it earned miles. Plus, I don't know about anyone else and I'm not trying to start a whole thing here, but I quite like flying LOT, lots of ERJs, no middle seats
Originally Posted by
jerry_greece
When it comes to intra-EU, i am afraid that the whole LH group fares in Economy (due to the NDC capabilities (e.g. read
here)) are usually a no-go since most of them are K or L and the "cheapest" awarding one is S but that is already a significant amount of money for a few miles (i think it's around 500 max.). Sometimes I find that SN which follows a bit different procedure than the rest of LH group might give you a S far for 100-something euro oneway. Premium fares are okay if you avoid the non-earning P one. You have to check these through the airline websites though (which is quite consistent at least) or Expedia and then you can try book through an OTA if there is a price difference (the risk of booking another fare is low).
For transatlantic to USA I used to pick UA or AC since their cheapest fares (in K) always award 50% accrual. Premium fares on TP also award a fare amount of miles but their economy fare categories are messed up (we discussed this in this forum extensively).
Asia is also similar with SQ or TG also awarding 0 miles in the cheaper fares.
SQ/TG bother me for that, the flights aren't cheap, and a lot of them aren't particularly short either. If you don't wanna give miles for a Thai domestic flight, or a similarly short SQ flight, fine, hell 5 hours across the country nearly 3,000 miles on the lower Air Canada fares earn 0% to every program, so it's not unheard of.
That being said, I have no idea how anyone becomes a Lufthansa elite...maybe they have really high rollers but low number of elites.