I took a Lufthansa flight from Newark to Munich to attend DLD11. As usual, I booked economy in keeping with my philosophy of doing what most entrepreneurs of early stage startups would do. As it turned out, I had enough miles to upgrade to business. Now my fare was not an upgradeable fare, so I offered to pay the difference. The ticket agent proceeded to make the necessary changes which took a lot of time (15 minutes). Finally she swiped my credit card and then as the very last step, she swiped my frequent flyer card. Just as I had a big grin on my face, ready to receive my business class boarding pass, she said: "now I just need your PIN." "My PIN? But you have my frequent flyer card in your hand." "Yes, but it's a debit card not a credit card" "Really?" "Really"
Turns out that you can't redeem Lufthansa miles without your PIN. So I set about finding my PIN. Attempt 1: Calling the Miles and More program. Result: customer service line is available only on weekdays. Attempt 2: Self-service on the web. Result: we will email or mail your PIN to you. "Or mail?" Come again? Attempt 3: Talk to the local supervisor. Result: Sorry I can't help you. At this point about 30 minutes had passed. The agent now started to back out all the work she had done with me standing there fuming. This took almost another 15 minutes.
Net result: Lufthansa had just wasted 45 minutes of my time for not getting me into business class. They had also wasted an opportunity to make another 300 dollars of completely incremental revenues and burn 50,000 miles (which are otherwise a liability for them) on a flight that had 20 percent utilization in business class. All because they made it ridiculously hard to redeem miles and did not in any way empower their local agents to override this in a situation where it would have made completely obvious sense. Now add to this a blog post that details the experience.
