Avianca Fare Classes
 

Hello,

I am planning on flying targeted flights to gain 880 points relatively cheap for my LH Status on Miles and More in January.
The itinerary planned is LAX-SAL-PTY (2x Business for 80 Points total) and PTY-BOG-SJO as return (4x business for 800 points total).

Since Avianca is a star alliance member and lufthansa credits star alliance members points for flights with them, I thought it would be no problem.

To be sure it will go without problems, I entered the travel calculator site of miles and more to see the fare classes that credit miles and points, so I don’t fly those routes for nothing. Found the creditable fares, headed to the avianca site and…. finding no fare codes besides their non-helping S,M,L,XL,XXL stuff.
Therefore I researched on some other forums a bit where I have read that I should check ita matrix and expedia to find out the fare codes.

Did that and got F for the business class flights, which for miles and more is economy and credits no points and miles.
The funny thing is, that if search for the exact same flights in Economy, I get S, which actually credits points and miles in miles and more too.

I find it really odd that business doesn’t credit anything apparently, but I have no way to check officially with the avianca site, since it simply won’t display them.
Through some other sources I also found out that F on Avianca means 0% Credit Economy, which would match the thing that miles and more displayed to me, but since I fly in business and not eco I expect it to be a bug or error.

Has anyone here maybe flown with avianca and credited it to m&m that can tell me more about it?
Should I just gamble and book and if m&m doesn’t credit anything automatically ask support to credit the points manually? Would this be possible?
I had a similar problem with ITA in April, where they credited me manually and then the system followed in june, so I even got double credited. But since AV is not an LH group airline I am extra cautious.

Thanks in advance

As discussed in this forum, AV fare class F is business class of service, but does not credit any miles or points to any FFP other than Life Miles (AV).

The problem is that F is a new business class fare bucket for Avanca. Previously the business class fare buckets were J,C,D,A,K. Several months ago they changed the fare buckets and now the business class fare classes are J,C,D, and F. And now A and K are both economy fare classes. However in true Avianca form they have not communicated these changes to their *A partners, so until they do so any business class flights booked in F are not crediting anything to any *A partner programs. :rolleyes:
Ironically economy class flights booked in A or K are still being credited as business class fares to some (if not all) *A partner programs. Back in May I flew an economy class flight booked in K and it credited 150% to my TK account since TK still thinks that K is a business class fare. :D


https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...13a319c5f3.png




Even on expertflyer they still think that A is a business class fare. :confused:


https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...1f30e8a008.png

I believe that eventually other *A programs will start giving credit for F fares, once AV communicates these changes to their *A partners. But who knows when that will happen.. Its not that other programs are recognizing F as a "cheap" business class fare and purposely excluding it from crediting. (Like P fares on LH flights). It is that as far as *A partners are concerned F is basically a non-existing fare class on AV since AV has not informed any of their partners about these changes. Previously K was the "cheap" business class fare on Avianca and most partners were giving the same credit for K as they were for J,C,D. (Turkish Airlines was creditng 150% equally for all business fares J,C,D,A,K)
Maybe someone needs to point this out to directly to Star Alliance so that they can convince Avianca to fix this.

Thanks for all the replies.

So all in all, should I just gamble it and insist on m&m to credit me the points manually if there are any issues and F is still eco for them? The flight is still business, so theoretically they still owe me the points.

That’ is 100% not going to happen unless AV updates the new fare classes to all partners before you fly. I am not laughing at you or your situation, but it made me laugh to think that anyone could “insist” that LH do anything. Why don’t you see how much it would be to upfare your ticket from F to D? That would be the only way to guarantee that you will earn your miles. The good thing is that all AV business class fares are flexible/refundable, even the cheap ones, so you should be able to cancel and rebook without any penalty.

I just booked last week a ticket for October on AV going BCN-BOG-LPB-BOG-JFK and it was only about 200€ more to book it in D instead of F, so that is exactly what I did. At 150% it comes out to over 16000 status miles on TK which I need to requalify. So it is worth the extra 200€ for me in this instance to earn 16000 miles as opposed to earning 0 miles.

Thanks for your thought.
Normally I wouldn’t think so about LH, but as said, I had a similar experience in April when they merged with ITA and no points were credited. After insisting for 1 Month a Support Representative credited it to my account manually. And since the system did it itself too in late june (therefore crediting me double), I think that insisting and proving my flight was in business could help, since I do not care about the miles but more about the points.

The idea to rebook to a higher class is good, but since I don’t really have knowledge on how to do that, especially with avianca, I kindly ask you to help me on how to do that. For fare classes I am still a newbie :)

Absolutely no chance. It doesn't work this way.

if you booked directly with Avianca then you should call them, but if you don't speak spanish that could be challenging (so I've heard). If you booked with an agency then you should contact that agency.
In either case it might be easier to just cancel for a refund and rebook from scratch and request to be booked in D fare class (assuming it's still available).

But before you cancel anything you should see how much the fare difference would be between F and D classes. Just because in my case the difference was only 200€ doesnt mean it would be the same for your particular routing

Recently, I started observing that D inventory (as in Expertflyer) is often less (or occasionally even zero) while F is still available. It seems that quite a few of us book into D and they do not replenish D inventory….

Sorry to re-ignite an old thread.

i noticed on M&M they still had F class listed as economy and earning zero.

i raised a supper ticket with them, advising that this was now a business fare code and could this be updated. The response:

”Please note that Miles & More is bound by the contractual agreement with our partner airlines underlying certain terms and conditions regarding mileage credit of flights. As per our contract with Avianca, some classes are not eligible for mileage accrual, including F class.”

so I guess this won’t be changing anytime soon, even though they’ve missed the point about it being classified as economy.

I am looking at booking a flight that originates with United and ends with the last leg on Avianca. When I land in Bogota for the International > Domestic connection, I understand I need to pick up my bags and go through the entire gauntlet like checking in again. All of my United flights are business class and my Avianca domestic flight shows "H" class in economy. I am just trying to figure out if this covers all my baggage as I noticed they will ding you for everything. I can't seem to figure it out on the Avianca website?

If you purchased the ticket with UA the UA bagage policy will also determine the free lugagge allowance for the AV flight. Besides AV booking class H means nothing in respect to your luggage allowance which is determined by the fare label (light/basic or classic) - you can't see that from the booking class. Most likely your AV fare is classic,