Traveling On Lufthansa With A United-Issued Ticket? Good News For You! [Lufthansa Strike]

As I am sure you have seen if you look at other blogs or look at news, Lufthansa’s cabin crew is now into yet another day of strikes after a brutal strike on Monday that caused the cancellation of almost 1,000 flights affecting over 100,000 passengers! While Lufthansa has reportedly been handling it well with passengers by putting them on other airlines – even those not in the Star Alliance – the wait time on the phone has been pretty long (as you can imagine!).

Traveling On Lufthansa With A United-Issued Ticket?

Traveling on Lufthansa with a United-issued ticket during this strike? | Courtesy Tupungato via Shutterstock

I have a family member traveling soon on Lufthansa with a United-issued ticket and I have been tracking the cancellations and the strike each day to see if it would affect her. Since they had only announced every day or the evening before what airports are going to be affected, it has not that easy to predict if her flight would be cancelled. However, I finally visited the United website last night (should have done it a while before!) and checked out their notices page. Sure enough – the strike is on there along with a list of airports that they deem affected by the strike and within the exception policy.

Good News For You!

Well, not quite as good news as if your flight wasn’t delayed at all.

With this travel exception, if you are traveling to the affected airports (listed below) up until November 13 (as of right now – it may go longer), you can call in and get your flight changed at no charge to you for either the change fee or the change in airfare. The best part about this? The entire phone call for fixing her flight took less than 10 minutes – from the moment I dialed until I hung up! Much better than dealing with Lufthansa!

Now, to take advantage of this change and exception policy, you must have a ticket that was issued by United and with travel on Lufthansa. This includes both paid tickets and award tickets. Here are the airpots affected and the rules covering this exception:

Airports:

• Berlin, DE (TXL)
• Dusseldorf, DE (DUS)
• Frankfurt, DE (FRA)
• Hamburg, DE (HAM)
• Munich, DE (MUC)

Original travel dates:

November 6, 2015 – November 13, 2015

Flight changes:

• The change fee and any difference in fare will be waived for new flights departing between November 5, 2015 – November 20, 2015, as long as travel is rescheduled in the same cabin (any fare class) and between the same cities as originally ticketed.
• For wholly rescheduled travel departing after November 20, 2015, through February 28, 2016, or for a change in departure or destination city, the change fee will be waived, but a difference in fare may apply. Final travel must be completed by February 28, 2016.

This gives quite a bit of leeway for your travel plans! If this strike may disrupt your trip plans, this is the time to get the tickets changed! This works equally well if you want to shift the entire trip to January or February. While you will have to pay the difference in fare, tickets to many places around Europe are still low enough that it will not end up costing that much for many tickets. The biggest part about changing tickets is the change fee and that is waived!

To start with the change process, look up flights that will work for you. Other airlines in the Lufthansa group – like Austrian and Swiss – are unaffected by the strike and are ones you can look at changing to. Also, United flights are wide open for you to switch to. Just pick the flights and times you want and then give a call to 800-864-8331. Hold times may vary, but, again, my entire call last night took only 10 minutes.