Can't speak to LM, but TPG actually did a mild bit of useful reporting (albeit on a small sample size) regarding LH F trends:

https://thepointsguy.com/guide/lufth...s-expertflyer/

Thanks for this. Interesting and it would be more interesting to know their entire route network’s F availability.

Does anyone know what their best luck has been with LM and LH F space routes? Feel free to PM if you’d like.

I have successfully booked F from the West coast 2 times (1 x SFO, 1x LAX) but availability is usually lesser than what is available on UA. Each time LM released the seats just a few days before the flight, while UA had the availability for longer.
From east coast I generally see same availability as UA, ORD and BOS are 2 cities with relatively high availability.
In the summer, when they run YVR-MUC on A346, I have seen lots of days with 3+ F seats open.

Wow this seems rather lucky. I’ve seen it once from ORD and I have to fly to Munich every month for work from the states. I have always checked all cities and I never see it.

I am having problems with using LM on LH. On UA I am seeing multiple seats in F and J but on LM I see none. I have yet to find a single day on the LM website with with F available. Is there any way to check on a different website or phone in? Or is the only option the LM website?

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...3ccb335853.jpg

See post #103 ; if there are only two seats available to *A partners, LM will not usually have them available.

Thanks. That is frustrating but I guess less availability is the downside of using LM and paying less miles. After doing many single flight searchs with a couple of day I was able to find a few F awards seats. Often I am seeing that flights show up segment by segment but when I try to search the full path they do not. I'll try calling in to piece them together or do a separate positioning flight if that fails.

Yeah they haven’t been able to invent a LM system in Colombia that’s able to piece segments together. The best is to just quickly book one city to the other and get there using skiplagged or buying a cheap ticket.

It worked!
 

Thanks everyone for contributing to the information on this thread. I'd just like to report that I was able to find last minute availability for two for MUC-BOS returning from a week in Scotland. The LH First Class experience was amazing and well worth the extra effort and cost.

I initially booked two separate one way UA award tickets with the thought that I might find last minute LM availability for each. On the return, two tickets became available around 36 hours out, and I booked with Avianca and cancelled the original UA award tickets. LM did not show LH GLA-MUC availability but United did, so I decided to burn some UA miles to get to Munich since last minute cash prices were in the $600 range. At the airport, It took about 10 minutes, but LH was able to through-check from GLA even though the two tickets were awards from two different partners.

In the end the flight cost 15K UA + 87.5 LM miles + $160 in fees (mostly UA fees). Expensive, sure, but well worth it in my view. Expertflyer make it so much easier to do this with their alerts service, so you can add in $10/mo to the overall cost.

[MENTION=788425]joachimm[/MENTION] - that’s probably the best strategy, book something ‘ok’ which can be cancelled at moderate costs with the intend to switch to LH first last minute. Expertflyer for me hasn’t worked out in those cases, though. While I found their alert service useful for flights weeks out, for flights departing within a day or two I felt like I wasn’t getting alerts in real time, ended up cancelling my subscription with them. Not sure how often they run their searches within a 24hrs period.

Huh, now that I'm looking back at it, I can't find the alert email for the flight I ended up taking. I did receive a notification for the outbound at T-48 for Biz and T-24 for First but I waited too long to pull the trigger on those and then Avianca availability was gone or possibly never available. Now I'm thinking that I didn't receive an alert for the return flight but just manually checked on united.com.

Expertflyer says they use a "proprietary algorithm" to increase frequency of searches closer in and on the outbound it seems to have worked. I've spent a lot of time on EF reviewing seat charts as a predictor of LH F load at T-48, so I find the $10/mo charge to be acceptable; I also find it kind of fun. But it's certainly not perfect!

There was a period earlier this year (and perhaps prior to that) where EF could not search LH space <4 days to departure. Sometime between mid-June and mid-September, that changed and they can now see close-in space again.

Anyone have any recent experience. I’d love to book them close in. LH traditionally released them 15 days out, when does LM usually see them?

Seems like you can find certain city pairs of LH F fairly consistently close in, I’m just wondering how close in?

In my recent experience between 48-24 hrs before departure. Two weekends ago I picked up 2 F tickets MUC-BOS 36hrs before departure that actually showed up around 48 hrs before departure. United showed 4 seats. When UA only shows 1 or 2 seats LM often doesn't show availability.

Check out https://thepointsguy.com/guide/lufth...s-expertflyer/ for more data.

Any chance to the west coast?