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Award tickets generally book into standard economy, without basic economy restrictions.
Delta offers a basic economy award ticket, but for a long time they were the lone exception.
2 weeks ago, JetBlue added basic economy award tickets. That wasn’t a bad thing per se as there are no aspirational redemptions or outsized values in JetBlue’s fixed-value program. In and of itself, it merely opens up more opportunities for JetBlue passengers to choose the option that makes sense for them, without any deletion of their point’s value.
However, I fretted at the time that, “I really don’t want to see more airlines offering basic award fares. I doubt that American or United would offer cheaper basic awards, they would likely just make their lowest awards into basic awards and charge more miles to get a standard award.
Award tickets should be about rewarding loyalty, not about penalizing it. I think that’s why airlines haven’t matched Delta’s basic economy award approach until now. Sadly, the trend to the lowest common denominator seems inevitable at this point.”
I asked which airline would be next, and now we have our answer.
Lufthansa announced, “Exciting changes to your Award Flights from 3 June 2025.”
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts and airlines bearing exciting news or program enhancements.
Lufthansa Miles and More is more relevant for Europeans than Americans, but the program did have its sweet spots.
No longer.
For Austrian, Lufthansa, and Swiss flights, the award chart is being eliminated and miles will be calculated based on paid fares for your dates, which will include basic economy awards.
Lufthansa notes that miles required will drop in economy, while they will climb for premium cabins. There will still be a partner airline chart, but those rates will climb as well.
Airlines that price their awards solely on the cost of a ticket risk killing the golden goose of loyalty. They make loyalty transactional and remove the ability to get outsized value from points, which will just push people to switch to cashback cards.
Lufthansa doesn’t have any US bank mileage transfer partners, which makes them an outlier compared to other European programs like Air France, British Airways, and Virgin Atlantic that happily take mileage transfers from all US banks. Hopefully, other airlines won’t head down this path en masse.
Which airline will be next to introduce basic economy awards or tie the cost of award tickets to the paid cost of a ticket?
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8 Comments On "Bad Sign: Lufthansa Adding Basic Economy Awards, Will Tie Mileage Awards To The Paid Cost Of A Ticket"
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will this affect star alliance partner pricing (UA, AC, LM) on LH ?
It shouldn’t, but we’ll have to wait and see if there are availability changes.
Well they didn’t do what you feard might happen, you were debating whether united or others that have a hidden saver award chart will make their lowest fare for basic and hike reg awards, vs Lufthansa simply announced that they are going dynamic all together. It’s not the same.
So, it’s even worse than I feared?
It’s may be worse but it has nothing to do with what you speculated might happen. Tbh alot of times you get better value thru fully dynamic pricing like j6 vs united charging prices thru the roof and when comparing it to cash prices you don’t even get a value of a cent a point sometimes.
Which is why Dan recommends hybrid bank points, so you always have a floor value for your points
BA will be next
Great. Less jews will fly Lufthansa.