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Rare deal: buy Lufthansa miles at 0.94p
Dating back about a decade, Lufthansa faced a few lawsuits where people tried to claim compensation based on the price at which they sold their miles. At this point Lufthansa decided it was causing them too much trouble, and withdrew all related functionality suddenly. To date it is still the only mainstream airline that doesn’t allow point transfer from Marriott Bonvoy.
Whereas you still cannot purchase Lufthansa miles, they introduced something called Bundle & Go recently which is basically points package in disguise. The bundle includes some other discount and bonus, but I suspect people just buy it for the points.
Until September 30, you earn 60% bonus when purchasing any of the three bundles:
- S: €250 – 10,000 + 6,000 miles
- M: €1,000 – 50,000 + 30,000 miles
- L: €1,750 – 100,000 + 60,000 miles
You can buy up to 500,000 miles per calendar year excluding the bonus. Once you’ve purchased a bundle the miles should be deposited into your account within 5 business days.
If you are interested, the L package works best at 1.09 euro cent or 0.94p per mile. This is a very good price, especially considering how difficult it is to acquire Lufthansa miles.
Lufthansa doesn’t have the most generous award chart, and like all other European airlines their carrier-imposed surcharge is high, so you may be better off redeeming via Aeroplan or United instead. There are some exceptions though:
- One stopover is allowed each way on a roundtrip award
- Partner programs have access to Lufthansa’s first class award space only within 15 days prior to departure
- Lufthansa run frequent Mileage Bargain offers. At the moment a return trip in business class from Europe to certain North America destinations cost only 55,000 miles
- Their redemption chart has some sweet spots (price is for one-way)
- Europe – Middle East: 35,000 miles (B)
- Europe – North America / Africa: 56,000 miles (B)
- Asia – Hawaii: 35,000 miles (B)
- Any Domestic: 20,000 miles (B) or 25,000 miles (F)
One funny restriction is, Lufthansa doesn’t allow you to search award tickets unless you have at least 7,000 miles in your account. Therefore I have no idea how the availability and fuel surcharges are like nowadays.
Important note: Lufthansa miles expire after 36 months and nothing stops it unless you hold elite status or a Lufthansa credit card.
Save £££ on your airfare with rail / bus hidden-city ticketing
You might have heard of “hidden-city ticketing”, a trick to purchase cheaper air tickets by adding one or more segments to your desired itinerary. For example, Flying New York – London – Paris could be cheaper than New York – London due to its indirect nature, so in this case it saves money to book the first route and drop the second leg if you only intend to travel to London.
There are complications of course, which I will discuss later in this article. There is an advanced and safer approach though which is less-known, that takes advantage of the interlining agreement between airlines and rail / bus companies.
Actually I’ve been aware of it since a long time ago. I was studying in Switzerland and my Mum was coming to visit me. When looking for an air ticket Swiss’s website offered the following route: PEK-ZRH on Swiss, and then Zurich-Basel on a SBB train. It’s cheaper than flying to Zurich only!
Similar arrangements can be found on Lufthansa’s website between them and DB:
Apparently it’s not necessarily cheaper so you need to do your research.
Most practically, the trick works best if you are looking for a one-way flight to the UAE. A direct flight from London to Abu Dhabi on Etihad costs around £500:
Whereas adding a leg to Dubai reduces the price by more than half!
The trip from Abu Dhabi airport to Dubai is undertaken by a coach. If Dubai is your final destination, you could take the coach or make your own travel arrangement; otherwise just leave the airport and enjoy Abu Dhabi!
Traditionally there are two complications with hidden-city, but they are very unlikely to hinder the novel approach:
- Luggage check-through to the final destination – your luggage won’t check through onto the train or bus so you’ll have to collect them yourself anyway
- Airline blacklisting you for the behaviour – contrary to a flight, it’s technically very difficult for the airline to know if you’ve taken the train / bus journey or not, which prevents them from taking any actions against you
Etihad Gold, Dragonpass Prestige & Lifetime GHA Platinum for joining A Small World
Today let’s talk about a niche membership programme – A Small World (ASW).
A Small World is a paid membership scheme. There are multiple membership levels you can choose when signing up, and they come with benefits including hotel / airline status, award miles and more importantly, “member-only exclusive events”.
I have no idea how those events are like and I didn’t find much information online either, so let’s focus on the airline / hotel benefits today.
There are four different levels:
| Access | Lifetime | Prestige | Signature | |
| Validity | 1 year | Lifetime | 1 year | 1 year |
| Fee | €80 | €390 | €5,200 | €19,950 |
| Award Miles | – | – | 250,000 (Miles & More or Etihad Guest) | 1,000,000 (Etihad Guest) |
| Airline Status | – | – | Etihad Gold | Etihad Gold (*2) |
| GHA | Platinum | Platinum | Black | Black |
| Jumeirah | – | – | Silver | Gold |
| Dragonpass | – | – | Prestige | Prestige |
| Sixt | Gold | Gold | Platinum | Diamond |
And from my point of view, there are two opportunities here.
Lifetime – Pay €390 and you get lifetime GHA Platinum and Sixt Gold. It doesn’t sound too bad, especially the former which comes with solid benefits when you stay at hotels.
Prestige – the annual fee is definitely not cheap. However, the 250,000 award miles is worth around €3,000 already, and whether the remaining benefits are worth €2,200 is anyone’s opinion.
Multiply your miles earning on Lufthansa flights
Lufthansa (or more accurately, Miles & More) ceased selling award miles a few years ago, and even completely shut down partner transfers last year due to a lawsuit, although I believe it has been partially resumed since. However, there still appears to be a way to purchase miles from them, although kind of indirectly.
Miles and More has partnered with this company called Loy Logic to handle such transactions. One of the services is called Multiply Miles, which basically lets you pay for a subscription that awards you extra miles on your next Lufthansa Group flights.
You can choose from three pre-defined subscriptions, Lite, Classic and Pro:
Alternatively once logged in, you have the option of customising your own package:
At the lower end, you can pay €99 to double your miles for a month, capped at 5,000 miles; and at the top end, you can pay €2,049 to quadruple your miles for 12 months, capped at 120,000 miles.
As you can easily see, these aren’t any good rates at all, as you are paying 1.7 – 2 eurocents per mile, let alone the fact that you must fly to collect them! How Lufthansa always comes up with such odd and funny ideas really baffles me.
On the other hand, another service it provides could be quite useful – Transfer Miles. You could transfer miles between accounts at the price of 100 miles / euro, with a maximum of 50,000 miles. If you or someone you know need a small amount of miles for a redemption, it could be a cheap and fast way to solve it.
My Review of the Lufthansa Senator Lounge, Munich T2
Finally a chance to utilise my matched TAP Portugal Gold status! Having an early evening flight back to London, I decided to come to the airport a bit early to try out the Lufthansa lounge.
Being one of the two hubs, Munich has a total of 11 Lufthansa lounges, which is very impressive! For comparison, BA has “only” 7 departure lounges between T3 and T5 at Heathrow.
However, due to the current situation only three of them are open: one business lounge and one Senator lounge, which are next to each other; and the Senator cafe. All three are in the Schengen departure area, so do not cross the border too early if you are flying to the UK!
The two lounges are close to gate G28, which is a short walk from the security check.
After showing my boarding pass, I’m guided to the left-hand side leading to the Senator section, reserved for Star Gold members. The concept of Senator lounges is a nice touch from Lufthansa, as they are usually slightly better than the business counterpart and convey the airline’s appreciation of loyal customers.
The inside area is not huge – on the left there’s a dining area, and on the right there’s a semi-enclosed, and quieter room if you need some space to yourself.
Further down there are some work desks, and a few lounge chairs for you to lie down.
In terms of food, there are two options on offer: chicken drumsticks and potato stew. I find the quality excellent, especially the former – I’d probably rank it as one of the most tasty food I’ve had in any airport lounge!
The food station and bar are staff-serviced. You can also help yourself to snacks and desserts – the chocolate with cream toppings is also very nice.
I like the interior design of this lounge. It feels different to the other Lufthansa lounges I’ve been to, probably as I don’t see much dark grey or brown colours here, and the overall theme is a lot brighter. All in all, I really enjoyed my experience here, and thank you TAP Portugal 😉!
My Review of the Lufthansa Business Lounge, LHR T2
Courtesy of TAP Portugal, I’m now Star Alliance Gold until April next year 😉. My first relevant experience should have been Ankara, when I flew Turkish Airlines to Istanbul. However it’s only until I passed security did I find out that TK has a separate VIP terminal at Ankara airport! Well, stupid me…
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