Award Success: Last Minute Lufthansa First Class Frankfurt-Shanghai-Beijing For 115k United Mileage Plus Miles

In our regular series Award Success today we feature my recent redemption for Lufthansa First Class Frankfurt to Shanghai (and onward to Beijing) through United Mileage Plus.

I found myself having to purchase this ticket relatively last minute as my initial plans to spend Christmas and New Years in South Africa with family fell through.

Sometimes things develop literally last minute and then it’s good when you have a stack of miles which you’re able to utilize in order to secure your onward travel.

A couple days before my departure which I planned to have on DEC 24th the latest I found availability for Lufthansa First Class to Shanghai which is served by an Airbus A380 from Frankfurt.

At that point I wasn’t sure yet if I would be going to either Shanghai or Beijing so there was a great option available of adding a segment on Air China Business Class from Pudong to Capital Airport as well.

I wanted to keep my options open and in the end I was glad I did because I actually ended up going to Beijing on that day and also there was no direct flight available at the time I booked anyway. The award obviously cost the same no matter if I booked it to Shanghai, Beijing or even another destination in the particular region and you can always throw away the last segment if you need to.

Lufthansa has an extremely limited schedule over the Christmas holidays so the options ex Frankfurt were scarce. Business Class is only 40,000 United Miles less than First Class and considering I just redeemed a 150k miles Marriott Travel package a few weeks before I thought why not just go for First as long as it’s available. And that’s exactly what I did.

I find this pricing pretty reasonable. The close is booking fee is always a bit of a nuisance but since I’m United Silver through the Rewards Plus Partnership with Marriott this was reduced to $50 plus the actual airport taxes of 90,99 EUR. In Total I spent 138,16 EUR and 115,000 Mileage Plus Miles for this award.

A friend who also ended up booking the same flight paid roughly the same in Lufthansa Miles&More Miles by the way: 105k plus 319 EUR (only for Frankfurt-Shanghai).

Conclusion

Lufthansa First Class was certainly a nice way to hop over to Asia and the fact that I was able to book this great award last minute when seats were already very limited was really lucky. Lufthansa First Class is a little difficult to book but two weeks prior to departure they open the seats up to partner programs such as United Mileage Plus or Avianca Lifemiles.

If you book your award with Lufthansa Miles&More you can actually book up to a year (actually 330 days) in advance so this currency gives you more flexibility.