Lufthansa Premium Ecomony for United Premier?
 

At the moment I have UA Silver status. I have a trip booked with UA and LH legs. The tickets are on United stock 016. I am able to select seats for UA legs, and I understand from the forum that I will be able to select my LH seats at checkin.

I know I will be able to select a UA E+ seat at checkin. My question is will I be able to select LH Premium Economy seats for free at checkin?

And also, can I checkin for both legs simultaneously, even though the LH leg departs about 12 hours later?

LH (and NZ, NH, AC etc) have Premium Economy as a separate cabin... at significantly higher prices. So no...you will not be able to select it like E+...

Sorry....

UA E+ cannot be compared with and is far inferior in all respects to Premium Economy standard found on *A airlines including LH. As stated by trooper you will not be able to select seats in LH Premium Economy unless you are prepared to cough up a lot of extra bucks for the privilege.

LH will sometimes offer a buy up to Premium Economy for around 300 Euros, but that can only be done at the LH counter when you check in. When you pull up your reservation on the LH web site and select the seat map, you may have a chance to purchase better seating in regular economy for significantly less if the flight's crowded and you want to avoid a middle seat. If you take the buy up to PE, you don't get the bonus UA miles, even though your LH BP will show an "E" fare.

Sounds to me like OP is unaware that some carriers actually offer Premium Economy as a separate class with (possibly substantial) additional benefits and service, whereas UA's is not a separate class of service but rather front of Economy section with a few minor enhancements to pitch and check-in services.

While some of us who travel other carriers may find that funny, it seems like a reasonable question for the uninitiated...and nothing to laugh at. Every one of us who was new to a carrier at some point would have to learn this.

Its funny, my company will pay 5000 dollars for me to fly on Luftansa Premium economy, but if I wanted to pay 3000 dollars on the same route to fly business I'll get fired. PE is becoming very popular from what I can tell. I actually got opted up to it once as a platinum so there is some very minor hope for you.

I just had this happen to me (getting my expense claim denied). I am allowed PE. But booked a P fare on UA for less than the PE seat on LH.

One bad thing is you cannot book PE on LH with 016 ticket stock. Still need PQD's for 1k.

Understood.

Indeed I was considering the premium economy somewhat equivalent to E+. I have had upgrades to premium economy on other international carriers before. The real differences that I have seen are usually extra storage around the seat, slightly different seat design and maybe a bottle of water. I guess that since these were upgrades at the gate, I wasn't exposed to the other benefits of premium economy such as extra baggage allowance.

I appreciate the input.

I too find this hilarious. The threshold for what I can spend over the base economy fare to upgrade to PE is high enough that I could also upgrade to business (many times for cheaper, actually) on a UA buy-up offer. Yet saving that money and ending up in J instead of PE is grounds for termination or cancellation of travel.

I can only assume there is a compliance or control issue somewhere that specifically refers to J/F travel instead of looking at the dollar amount.

Slightly different seat design??? Compared to regular Y, these seats have quite a bit more pitch (38" vs. 30-31 in Y, 34-35 in UA E+, they are wider and have more recline. They would never be mistaken for modern business seats, but I think stating that they are a slightly different seat design understates the product quite a bit. Some airlines also give enhanced F&B over regular Y.

The OP is referencing his experience with OTHER carrier's premium economy product, as he has never flown LH.

OP seems to be confused between E+ and PE. I find LH's PE very similar and comparable to other carriers, such as say Air France, LAN, British Airways etc, that is substantially superior to the extra legroom economy offerings from US carriers, and much closer to a domestic business seat.

Yeah, but hilarious in the :rolleyes: sense.

Agreed. Especially while walking past the ultimately cheaper lieflats on my way to my seat.

Actually it has happened for me. I used Google Flights to book a same-week departure SFO-MUC, and the default lowest economy option was a ticket in LH E class. There actually was a lot of discussion about it here ( http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/lufth...e-checkin.html ) and it turned out to be legit, no mistake.

To be more specific, the rt ticket was 016 ticket stock, but involved LH flight numbers (and was able to be ticketed as 016 because of a last segment on UA).

By the way, Lufthansa also has a bid-for-upgrade system, but I myself have never known anyone who has tried or been successful at it.

https://www.lufthansa.com/online/myp...390&NOSSO=true