I had a situation where my LH issued F ticket had a cancellation from TG on one segment, first call to HON line & the agent at BER told me to call TG….. i asked what use that would be on a LH F ticket, no response…. had to call the F line & then it required the Supervisor to intervene because they could not see any seats in F when on the direct flight they were selling 5 online….

Somebody reported that agents are more/less helpful in such situations, which I don't find helpful, as HUCA wastes my time.

But I certainly agree that the policy to distinguish between existing and new bookings is not very customer friendly and it also annoys me that LH cancelling flights all the time is treated so differently from us asking for (sometimes small) changes.

Yup, LH selling "full fare flex" F tix that aren't flexible at all is false advertising at the least, fraud at worst.

While I finally got my one-day change, it took two weeks and no small amount of time spent on the phone over this.

One would think that LH would want to keep its highest yield and most profitable customers happy with extremely small changes that are promised at the time of purchase, but all they've accomplished is that I'm now looking to book with AF for full fare first revenue tickets for upcoming flights. While the FC line is great for shortening the wait times for calls, if getting Y (or no) service is the result, why have a FC phone number at all?

Congrats, LH, your stupid intransigence is now costing you real cash because you couldn't accommodate a change for a full F customer that would have cost you, literally, NOTHING.

your example will not fly...

we all agree, that the same flight will vary in pricing, depending on the POS. fine. we are discussing something else ....

and to build that into your example. you have purchased a car at 100k$ on a flexible rate, the color is green (RBD "A" in airline language). The manufacturer delivers every day 10 cars, 5 green (RBD A) and 5 red (RBD F) ones. the red ones are 1k$ more expensive. you agree to take over the green car, which you have booked (in RBD A) and paid for, on Wednesday. But later you decide to take the car a day earlier. green (RBD A) and red cars (RBD F) are available, but the manufacturor says "sorry, we'll only give you the red car for 1k$ more (RBD F), you cannot have the green one (RBD A), even though available".

And to round it off, the text the carrier "SHALL LIMIT THE NUMBER OF PASSENGERS CARRIED ON ANY ONE FLIGHT AT FARES GOVERNED BY THIS RULE AND SUCH FARES WILL NOT NECESSARILY BE AVAILABLE ON ALL FLIGHTS. THE NUMBER OF SEATS, WHICH THE CARRIER SHALL MAKE AVAILABLE ON A GIVEN FLIGHT, WILL BE DETERMINED BY THE CARRIERS BEST JUDGEMENT." has nothing at all to do with limiting rebooking's, it refers to the public availability in the GDS. As its been clarified, the flights do have seats on the journey. This text merely means there will not be 100 seats in A class.

Agreed, that’s a reasonable interpretation in English language & certainly by Law in the UK

Another interesting experience here trying to change an ANCXX fare (basically the lowest and most restrictive fare family in first class). I called in to the 365 number listed above from Skype to request a voluntary change last week, and an agent picked up after literally 1 second after I hit option 3 for English. Now the change I wanted to make was blowing the booking out of the water entirely (dates, origin, destination) and complicated in that it had non codeshare non LH group metal on it but was still something I could piece together using the multi city tool on the LX website. So after feeding the agent dates and flight numbers, he told me the automated system couldn't handle it, he'd have to get a manual calculation for any fare difference and would call me back that afternoon.

I didn't get a call back that day so called in again the next day to get an update - I knew the agent had done something though as I could see both sets of flights under my reservation on the website. I had to wait about 10 minutes on hold this time, before an agent picked up which seemed like she was at the general reservations line as they said there weren't any notes in the booking, and after looking further she said that she'd get someone from the HON desk to call me back ASAP (I'm not HON...), so it appears that this line may ring over to the general call center after a certain waiting period. Well, lo and behold I had a callback from the same agent that had initially taken my call the first time around within about another 5-10 minutes on my mobile, who apologized profusely for not returning my call, and astoundingly the fare difference he gave me was very close to what I'd calculated my own - within about 50 EUR or so from my own calculation, not the thousands I was dreading hearing *especially* because I forced a routing via LAX which has been fairly difficult to get for some time in A even for a new booking.

So, in sum, trying to do these changes is completely YMMV!

May I ask, how much have you paid in total for this change?

The additional collection was 376 EUR.

I get the sense that booking anything in F with LX out of LAX is extremely difficult, irrespective of the fare bucket (Axxxx vs. Pxxxx vs. Fxxxx vs. whatever other buckets may exist).

No idea why this is, but thanks for sharing your experience - it's a good data point for me (and I'm assuming many).