kokonutz

[rant]
To me, *A is really no great shakes. As a UA 1k, there are too many limitations on earning miles and too few upgrade opportunities to make *A worthwhile. But I always sort of assumed in the back of my mind that *A would really be of benefit when I wanted to start cashing in miles for free travel.

Well, I have a friend who is thinking about coming over the Altbier next weekend. So I set about exploring the labrynth of finding free seats. UA was a bust, the only option being connecting thru ORD and arriving in the afternoon.

So I wanted to try one of 2 things:

1) Combine an IAD-LHR on UA with an LHR-DUS on LH. Apparently this is impossible, or at least would require double the miles (depending on whom I asked).

2) Get an award IAD-FRA-DUS on LH. To do this, apparantly UA has to ask LH if that is ok. LH then has 72 hours in which to get back to UA. One cannot have multiple requests in to LH at the same time. So if the first routing/class is denied, then you have to go back and try again and wait up to another 72 hours. After two of these, departure date will be upon us!!!!!

All in all, I am just as disapointed in *A's benefit in claiming award travel as I am at the "benefits" of flying *A.
[/rant]

I feel much better for getting that off my chest!

AC*SE

I have been very lucky.

As an SE with AC, I have been able to pick up seats on UA or LH pretty much on demand. The only time I had a problem was finding a return JFK-HKG in F for one ticket.

The SE desk are really accomodating. On short notice requests, they will call the partner carrier, and be quite proactive.

I think that the quality of service varies, depending upon the airline and person that you get. This should be one of the things that the * members look to solidify through more facilitated access to res systems across the alliance, and alliance wide reward tables.

Unterwegs

I am LH Gold. Never had problems in getting an UA/LH combination. Using 100.000 LH miles each time i did LAX-JFK on UA and then JFK-FRA-STR or ZRH on LH in F.
I was allways able to get the booking within a few minutes by calling Miles and More in the US. Only once there was no F-Seat on UA on the day i wanted to go from LAX to JFK - the lady checked all possible combinations and i had to settle for Business Class on this sector.

BlondeBomber

Now kokopuffs), it's only a week away from Altbier. You didn't really expect to get seats this close for just a friend, did you? Probably trying to bung them in coach too

I guess we'll have to have an alliance arm wrestle at Altbier and settle this debate about whether alliance are good or bad the old fashioned way!

Did you try SK? I know there were great fares (a couple of days ago for about 600 US) out of ORD and SEA on SK via CPH to DUS so maybe they would have reward inventory.

BEER BEER or if you prefer ALTBIER ALTBIER

transpac

In order to address the immediate problem, I recommend that you book an award ticket on UA IAD-FRA and spring for a train ticket FRA-DUS. The train is very easy to catch at FRA (a bit of a walk) and it's a beautiful train ride. Back in March a R/T 1st class train ticket cost me 260 DEM. It's ~ 3 hr train ride.

kokonutz

The LH award cleared. Now to see if she really minds sitting in Coach (nice call, Blondie!) for 14 hours to spend 22 hours with a bunch of flyergoons

Maybe this Star Alliance thingy ain't so bad after all .

[This message has been edited by kokonutz (edited 11-03-2000).]