Questions and Answers

After reading Lucky’s post about purchasing LifeMiles, I signed up for a LifeMiles account, then I checked out LifeMiles webpage for checking award seat availability 10-11 months ahead. Interestingly however, the overall majority of options for a r/t Business class fare between BNA and BUD displayed “mixed cabins”, and the ridiculous thing was that the only business class segment was FRA-BUD, the LEAST important. Only on the way back, the BUD-JFK segment very rarely came up as Business class (Brussels airlines). Has anyone had similar experiences about poor business class availability on Star Alliance airlines if you try to book award seats through LifeMiles? Thank you.

I think you need to focus first on gateway to gateway. Neither of your cities are. Check from major cities like ORD, IAD, EWR, YYZ where other star alliance carriers depart from. You are looking for SAS, Austrian and Swiss. Then get flights to BUD if necessary (you can take a train from VIE). After that get a flight from BNA to the gateway. Put that all together in the multi-city tool and see what happens. Or you can try emailing them (I hear this is an endeavor, I’ve not done it.)

Keep in mind a problem is many Europe *A flights are on LH which doesn’t release reward space 10-11 months out for J.

My point is to get the main overseas flights down and work from there.

[QUOTE=”MarkS, post: 27400, member: 2121″]I think you need to focus first on gateway to gateway. Neither of your cities are. Check from major cities like ORD, IAD, EWR, YYZ where other star alliance carriers depart from. You are looking for SAS, Austrian and Swiss. Then get flights to BUD if necessary (you can take a train from VIE). After that get a flight from BNA to the gateway. Put that all together in the multi-city tool and see what happens. Or you can try emailing them (I hear this is an endeavor, I’ve not done it.)

Keep in mind a problem is many Europe *A flights are on LH which doesn’t release reward space 10-11 months out for J.

My point is to get the main overseas flights down and work from there.[/QUOTE]
Thank you Mark S. I have been doing this BNA-BUD reward-ticket-hunting for more than a decade, and never really had this problem with AA or UA or even DL (either they had business class availability or not). With regards to LH, they do have availability in the intra-European segment, so that is why I thought that they have already opened up the award seat inventory for the transatlantic segment as well. I tried the itinerary from JFK, still no business seat on the transatlantic segment. The annoying thing is that they still price it at 63k, even though 3 out of 4 segments are on economy. I will keep checking other options though as you recommended. Thanks again.

Yes, you can get LH in Europe all day long, but over the pond is a different story.

Another idea is you might use United to find availability then try and find it on Avianca. Their site will make you want to pull your hair out.

Note: JFK is not a good *A gateway with United not flying there. I’d look at EWR, YYZ and YUL. Air Canada has good availability to Europe as does Swiss from these cities.

Good luck.