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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.
Buy Star Alliance Gold & 130K miles for €718
TAP Portugal has been running a status match promotion – and now even better, you could buy out a Star Alliance Gold card directly without any conditions!
The offer page is here. Now through 30th November, if you purchase the Club Top or Club Platinum membership, you’ll be granted TAP Portugal Silver or Gold status for six months.
They match Star Alliance Silver and Gold status respectively. Your account will be updated by 9th December.
As we know, *A Silver means next to nothing, so let’s just take a look what Club Platinum offers:
- Annual fee: €718
- *A Gold for six-months, and then TAP Silver benefits until it expires
- 36,000 welcome miles, plus 8,000 miles per month, so a total of 132,000 miles after one year
- Some exclusive benefits when you fly TAP, e.g. 25% bonus miles
*A Gold comes with business class check-in, fast track, airport lounge access (plus one guest) and additional baggage allowance etc, when you fly TAP, Lufthansa Group, United, ANA and other *A carriers. You are essentially pay seven hundred euro for these benefits and 130K miles.
You can check TAP Portugal’s redemption chart here. There’s nothing exceptional, but with 130K miles you can still get a one-way flight in business class from Europe to any part of world except Australia, subject to taxes and fees of course.
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…
(more…)TAP Portugal’s response to your status match request is REALLY fast
We posted about the return of TAP’s status match programme yesterday (probably the first in the entire blogger network!). A reader has already submitted his application and got some positive feedback!
(more…)TAP Portugal re-opens their status match programme – get your Star Alliance Gold today!
To give you some context, TAP Portugal ran a status match promotion back in March, for which you could match *A Gold or Silver status to your Skyteam or Oneworld cards. The promotion has just re-opened, so don’t miss it this time if you didn’t join the party!
(more…)Free stopover and cheap business-class awards with Singapore’s KrisFlyer programme
Like many of its counterparts in Asia, Singapore Airlines has a very good reputation for its services in the air. I’ve flown Singapore Airlines twice on J, and was very impressed by how wide their old A380 business class seat was.
(more…)Juneyao Airlines Status Match Programme
You may not have heard of Juneyao Airlines. It is a small-ish airline in China, and it is the first Star Alliance connecting partner – meaning that it is not part of the alliance, but there is some sort of deep collaboration between Juneyao and some of the *A airlines.
(more…)