A couple of days ago I blogged about Lufthansa’s next A380 destination, San Francisco. They’re going to start daily service there on May 10, replacing the current daily 747 service. I think this choice came as a shocker to many of us for a few reasons. First of all, Swiss began service to San Francisco last year, meaning there’s already a lot of new capacity to/from Europe from San Francisco within the Lufthansa “family.” Beyond that, United runs a 747 daily, Lufthansa runs an A340 from Munich, and in the summer United runs a second frequency. In other words, in the San Francisco to Frankfurt market, we’ll go from seeing two daily 747s in April to seeing an A380, 747, and 777, all daily, in the summer.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I encouraged people to book first class awards for later in the year, before the A380 was loaded into the system (because Lufthansa doesn’t open up first class award space on the A380 for partner airlines). It worked for many people, and I even snagged a couple of seats for December.
Yesterday Lufthansa finally loaded the A380 into the system, though only for the summer schedule, through October 29. Beyond that, the flight still shows as being operated by a 747. This raises the question, is it only a function of Lufthansa not getting around to loading the winter schedule yet, is Lufthansa not sure yet whether they want to keep the A380 in the market, or do they already know they won’t be flying the A380 there come November?
On one hand I believe they just haven’t loaded the A380 into the system for winter yet, but on the other hand, I would have thought they would at least get rid of all the first class award space in the schedule after October 29. Then again, there’s no huge harm in having a couple of award passengers on each flight for a couple of months. After all, if anything it will only generate more interest, and I doubt they would sell all eight first class seats at full price anyway.
So I’m in a bit of a pickle. On one hand I want to wait it out and see what they end up doing for the winter schedule, but at the same time, I want to make alternate travel plans if the A380 doesn’t materialize. The tough thing is that we probably won’t get any confirmation of this for a long time if they don’t plan on keeping the A380 on the route…
I guess I’ll just have to be patient for once…
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