Lufthansa is putting the superjumbo Airbus A380 onto the Denver – Munich route April 30 through September 30th. The plane will also operate from Munich to New York, Boston, Washington, Los Angeles and Delhi.
That’s a lot of airplane with a lot of seats to fill, and award space especially on the Denver route is wide open using miles from partner frequent flyer programs.
The airline’s Airbus A380 has 8 first class, 78 business class, 52 premium economy and 371 economy seats. The Denver flight offers the best space out of all of the A380 routes currently – most days seem to have 9 or more business class award seats available.
The major challenge looking for award space is going to be finding United Airlines connecting space to a Lufthansa A380 gateway. So if you don’t live in Denver, or a city where the plane operates and is offering space, you need to get there. Often that’ll mean an inconvenient United economy flight to connect to business class. Of course you can connect beyond Lufthansa’s Munich hub as well.
I show you this United MileagePlus award calendar not because you should be booking these seats through United, but rather because it’s a quick and dirty way to give you a sense for wide open availability every day.
- Air Canada generally charges 70,000 miles each way for business class between the U.S. and Europe on most Lufthansa routes. Their chart is distance-based and will get you as far as Denver – Munich – Sofia, Bulgaria (but not all the way to Istanbul at that price). You can transfer to Air Canada from Chase, Amex, Capital One and Bilt.
- United Aeroplan it’s a much better deal than United at 88,000 miles each way. You can transfer from Chase or Bilt to United.
- Avianca LifeMiles is quirky. It is charging 69,000 miles for Denver – Munich. Pricing will vary a bit based on your actual destination and whether onward connections are in business or economy. You can transfer from Amex, Citi, Capital One, and Bilt to LifeMiles.
The Airbus A380 isn’t the best Lufthansa business class product. It’s in 2-2-2 configuration. However if you’re looking for family Europe travel you may prefer the less private layout this offers.
Lufthansa hasn’t been releasing much business class award space to partners at all, so this is an unusual windfall.
Alrighty then. I take it back. LH is finally more generous with the award space. May have to pull the trigger on this, even though it is before Allegris is complete. What can I say; I’m a sucker for double-deckers. Saw one of them parked at MNL for maintenance recently, and hoped it’d be back in service soon enough. Here we go!
I saw this a few weeks back and already have IAD-MUC and MUC-IAD, both on the A380, for the spring. If you have the UC card, the price is the old 80K. Good use of UA points. I’m wondering what the best business seat on the old LH A380 is – and front section or back section. Online reviews seem to differ.
100k miles plus $2,262 in fees per person through ANA. Not an appealing choice.
I just signed up for an Air Canada account, but don’t see any business class availability. It keeps directing me to CA version (as opposed to US) of website. If anybody knows how to get it to price business, I would appreciate it!
Aeroplan actively blocks LH award space (most of it anyway) to promote their own crappy and overpriced metal – so dont expect to find any space there.