A first class experience

While special packages will be in the back of the minds of the seasoned travelers or even the first-time tourists, some would prefer their own itinerary that holds leisure travel with a plan of their own in the summer. Or for that matter any time during the year.

Airlines too are getting their acts together to entice the tourists with some of the best services under their wings. Lufthansa and British Midland International (bmi) recently took Saudi journalists on a fam-trip to provide firsthand experience of the products of Lufthansa and bmi, while also enabling the press team to get to know Europe’s two biggest aviation hubs — London and Frankfurt.

Stefan Loecherbach, director Lufthansa and British Midland for Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, who was one of our hosts during the trip, put the airlines commitment to the Saudi market succinctly.

“With the introduction of our wide-body Airbus featuring a three-class cabin and the new service to Jeddah, Lufthansa underlines again its strong commitment to the Saudi market, offering unparalleled choice and travel flexibility. Our resolve is to provide high quality products and to make them available to more customers in more places in the Kingdom,” he said.

Lufthansa and its affiliate British Midland International jointly operate 36 flights a week from Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam to Frankfurt, London and Munich. They provide first choice travel flexibility to customers in the Kingdom. Step by step Lufthansa increased its presence in Saudi Arabia over the past years. In 2009 the German airline upgraded its services from Riyadh and Jeddah to a daily flight on each route. In April 2010 it introduced three weekly flights between the Saudi capital and its Munich gateway in southern Germany and at the end of October 2011, Lufthansa will launch a three weekly Jeddah-Munich service. Hence Lufthansa will be operating 24 weekly flights from the Kingdom to Germany.

Lufthansa’s subsidiary and partner British Midland International operates nonstop services to London-Heathrow from Riyadh (6 weekly), Jeddah (3 weekly) and Dammam (3 weekly).

Apart from providing direct flights to these major European hubs, Lufthansa and its British affiliate provide lean connections to over 130 destinations across Europe and over 200 cities worldwide via their gateways in Frankfurt, Munich and London. Customers can fly to 21 destinations in North America nonstop from Frankfurt or Munich. Many more points are served in cooperation with code share partner United Airlines.

Lufthansa Miles & More? More Like Miles & Less

I have been traveling with Lufthansa for over 15 years, and until very recently had nothing but good experiences with the company. My latest experience with the Star Alliance affiliate, however, made me aware of a few company policies that are extremely unfavorable to consumers.

To give you some context, I typically fly back and forth between Washington, D.C. and my native Greece a few times a year. As a result, I have racked up literally hundreds of thousands of rewards miles, which until recently made me a Star Alliance Silver Status customer. Before losing this status, I noticed that miles I should have earned for a number of flights had not been credited to my account even though I had presented my Miles and More card at check-in.

As a result, I decided to take a closer look at my account, and what I found was a poorly-run rewards program lacking in both transparency and customer service that actually provides an incentive for many of its customers to establish a relationship with another airline. In short, there are four main problems with Lufthansa’s rewards program.

First, Lufthansa is not nearly transparent enough about how customers earn their rewards miles. I came to this conclusion after examining my flight history and discovering that I had not always earned the same number of miles for the flights I routinely took between Washington, D.C. and Athens. Does the distance between cities fluctuate? Did I sleep through that Geography class?

Nope, apparently Lufthansa has merely come up with a deceiving strategy of giving more rewards miles (up to 70% more) to one economy class ticket vs. another economy class ticket and one business class ticket vs. another. As most people purchase their tickets through travel-related websites and travel agents, this makes it nearly impossible to determine how rewarding a given flight will be at the time of booking a ticket.

Second, Lufthansa’s policies are geared toward tricking customers out of the miles that they have earned rather than crediting them for loyal business. More specifically, any miles discrepancies must be reported within two weeks of an account being updated, or Lufthansa will assume that the balance is correct. On the phone, a customer representative told me that because my flights had been more than six months ago, the company could not credit my miles. Regardless of whether it’s two weeks or six months, there should be no time limit because customers are entitled to the miles they have right fully owned, no matter what.

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