For various reasons, Lufthansa’s Miles & More programme tends to get slightly less attention than British Airways and Air France-KLM. The various status matches over the past couple of years, along with the 100,000-mile challenge, have helped change that somewhat. We also published a Miles & More redemption guide last year, and there are quite a few interesting sweet spots now that dynamic pricing has been introduced.
But there was one major highlight of Miles & More redemptions that I completely missed at the time. I only discovered it recently while looking into flights to Asia next year: flying from Seoul to London / Europe in Business Class can cost an astonishingly low 40,000-ish miles one way!
Taxes and fees come to just over £230, which is still fairly reasonable. Economy and Premium Economy are even cheaper, as you can see, but in terms of value for money, Business Class is definitely the one to go for.
One thing to note is that Lufthansa operates two daily flights from Seoul. The 13:30 flight to Munich uses an older A350 with the very poor 2-2-2 Business Class cabin – not a particularly pleasant experience.
The 12:55 flight to Frankfurt, on the other hand, is operated by a 787-9 featuring the new Allegris cabin, marked in the screenshot above. Compared with the old 2-2-2 setup, it’s an entirely different generation and a much more modern experience.
As a result, award availability to Frankfurt is trickier to find. You’ll need a bit of patience to hunt it down, whereas the Munich flight is much more available.
If you have a Lufthansa Senator Card, things get even better. First, you get a 50% discount when redeeming for a second passenger. So for two people travelling together, the total comes to just 70,000 miles plus around £470 in taxes and fees. For a flight to London, that’s a pretty sweet deal!
Second, you can borrow an overdraft of up to 50,000 miles, so there’s no need to worry if you don’t quite have enough miles in your account.
Third, most Business Class seats on the Allegris cabin normally require an additional fee to select. With Senator status, however, you can select all seats for free apart from the four Suites in the first row.
The biggest problem, of course, is earning Miles & More miles. There are very few transfer partners outside the German-speaking countries, so the quickest option is usually buying miles through its Bundle & Go programme.
If you have a German mailing address, there are also ways to indirectly buy miles quite cheaply through magazine and newspaper subscriptions.
As for Lufthansa Senator status itself, retaining it is unfortunately far too difficult. My matched Senator status expires next February, so I might as well enjoy it one last time while I still can.
Enjoy your ITA airways to Senator status match until next Feb..