Is Lufthansa restricting award availability to *A partners?
 

I checked ANA for award availability in first class on the FRA-BKK route and found close to none for LH metal in August. When checking from my M&M account I was really surprised to find availability wide open. Is Lufthansa having different award availability for members of its own FFP than for star alliance partners? So far, I always thought this was not the case.

LH offers different availability for the German Point Of Sale (POS) than for the others. That explains why you wouldn't get the same availability if you check via ANA, call the M&M call center in YPQ/IST/CPT and want to cash in cheap cheap US DM miles you hit cold hard stone.

oliver2002, thank you for your reply. I'm not sure what you mean with german point of sale. Are there other airlines' FFP with german POS? If I call the Frankfurt office of UA or ANA, would I get a different answer? I'm a bit confused what point of sale means in this case. If M&M is the only one with a german POS then effectively LH was "restricting award availability to *A partners" as per the topic question.

I think LH is making more award seats available to its own members. This is certainly true for members with status. ;)

Exactly. LH has played around with availability settings so they can offer they own FFP (M&M) better access to their award inventory. The past years witnessed a massive run on the F & C product, so they took action. The F & C awards are still offered to other *A partners, just capped at one point.

Oliver, thank you for the clarification. I guess I can't blame them. Availability on LH is generally pretty good.

And I did find (and ticketed) the FRA-BKK leg a few days later. Availability on that route did improve quite a bit a few days after I posted the question. I was just surprised by the large discrepancy of "any day available with M&M" vs. "nothing available in August on ANA" which I had never seen previously.

Swiss (part of LH) certainly does the same. Expert Flyer showed award seats not shown on ANA. These were available to their own members.

It's worse than that. The settings mean even some M&M elites don't have full access to awards on LH. Book through the online award booking engine and seats available, book through M&M call centre because you need to include non LH (etc) flights and the same seats are not available. Its [expletive deleted] annoying to have to get management assistance just to make simple bookings on LH legs of a longer itinerary.

I witnessed yesterday a booking F on US-Airways ex FRA.
Only 3 in O for an 13 h flight End September returning Beginning October on LH.

Does LH increase availability to their partners nearer the time of departure? I see plenty of space through LH M&M but not for US airways through ANA tool

Greetings from DPS,

I was easily able to get 2 F reward tix to/from FRA-BKK using Aeroplan.

Yes, but of course it depends on loads and expectation of future ticket sales.

As have many. Point of this thread is that Miles & More members get BETTER award availability than members of partner airline programs. So those times when awards are NOT available on LH (or LX) they may be available using M&M miles.

My experience is: When I can see availability on the ANA tool i always see it also online on the LH website (as SEN). But usually there is significantly more availability on LH.com
It seems that very far out (300 days or so) the availability on ANA and LH is similar, 30 days out there is far less on ANA and a few days out ANA shows similar availability again. Not sure if this was just a coincidence for the flights I checked.