Retroactive credit
 

Hi,

I freshly enrolled into the Miles & More program and just found out that Air India and Air China were both partners to Lufthansa.
Lufthansa allows you to claim retroactive credit for flights flown within the last 12 months -- I flew one CDG-EWR return trip on Air India 9 months ago and one CDG - BJS SHA-CDG open jaw on Air China last June, that got me no miles at all.

Unfortunately, I don't have anything from the flights - I guess I could probably get copies of the tickets from my travel agency, but for the boarding passes, I had to give them to the company's secretary at the time. There's a thread here (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=716587) where they say LH might give me credit for these flights even without boarding passes.

But before I get into the hassle of calling both my travel agencies to try and get a copy of the tickets, and then Lufthansa and explain my case, I was wondering -- do you know what LH's policy is for activity that occurred before enrollment into the M&M program?
E.g., American doesn't give retroactive credit for this, but with Flying Blue I got credits for flights I had flown two months before enrolling.

Drives me crazy to think that those miles might just be gone :(

Make a try. I was on a Jet Airways flight, when it was not a M&M Member. After joining the M&M, I send the Service Center the boarding pass, because there was no year on the BP, only the Date llike 17AUG. And it works, .... :)

Some mileage partners insist that LH sends them some proof, some don't. When I signed on my GF (now wife) on M&M, we sent in SK ticket copies and baggage stubs in (no BP, same case, she had to give it to her employer) and LH credited everything.

In other cases (SQ is particularly famous for this) LH came back after 3-4 weeks to state that the partner airline declined to credit due to missing documentation.

You have to be a M&M member at the time your flights took place. No activities BEFORE your enrolment in M&M will be credited to your account. That is at least the official rule and I doubt that M&M would deviate from this in your case; it would be much easier for M&M to decline your request for miles by referring to this rule rather than going through all the hassle crediting miles for flights without BPs.

In addition, I doubt that M&M would credit miles for flights on Air India and Air China without BPs. It will be difficult for M&M to verify your flights on these carriers; there is only a limited co-operation between these carriers and M&M/LH.

Sorry to say this - as you do not even have the original BPs - there is no chance you will receive miles for these activities.

This changed quite recently. Sorry I do not find the link, but it was in the AT-Newsletter: You can retrocredit miles up until 12 months before your enrolment date. (It may be only for LH flights, maybe somebody has the link.

Where is the hassle: Just get the copy of the tickets and send them in.
You may be lucky, but with some partners they do need the original Boarding-Passes and it may take some time.

its for any *A flights and i dont recall the change being recently. it was already that way when i signed up in 2001...

-- Well then I'll give it a try, and be patient, and cross fingers.:)

It worked!!
 

Hi guys,
Just so everyone knows - I just realized I got credited for the miles corresponding to these old flights on Air India and Air China that happened up to 9 months before I even enrolled in Miles and More.
In the end what I did was: write a nice letter to Lufthansa explaining that I had lost all boarding passes but with a receipt of the flight tickets and one baggage slip that happened to still be hanging on my luggage. They sent a very courteous letter saying that they were going to check with their partners, and a couple of weeks later I had been credited with 18,000 miles.

Thanks for giving me good advice at the time :-))