... for over 4 years, you were on my personal no-fly list, because of reasons. 1 month ago, I decided it was finally time to give you another chance. Here is how that went.
First trip - HAM-FRA-ALA and back, in late June.
HAM-FRA, A321
Paid for a seat 27D - best seat in the back of the house, behind the exit row, but missing a seat in front of it = infinite legroom.
Other than that, nothing to report.
FRA-ALA, A333
Again, a good seat, 22G in the A333 V3. That's an aisle seat in the first row behind premium eco. There is no bulkhead in between premium eco and standard eco, not even a curtain, and row 22 has a lot more legroom than the seats in premium eco. Beats me why LH does it that way, but hey...
I had booked a premium meal for this flight. Tried it on a KL flight to IAH earlier this year, and those were the best €25 I ever spent on airline food. KL had served a small bottle of champagne, shrimp salad, Belgian truffle chocolate sweets for desert, and as a main course a spicy Korean beef wrap that was actually spicy, and the beef fillet had been cooked on the spot - no idea how you actually do that with the onboard convection oven, but KL did it.
LH, however, did not. Their fillet of beef had been thoroughly cooked to death, and was hard to cut, even with metal cutlery. The side salat was the same as with the standard meals. The dessert was okay, and overall the food was not terrible, but also nothing I'd pay money for again.
Also, with KL, the special meal also gave me special attention from the cabin crew - an experience that many travellers report. The already-friendly crew seemed excited that I had ordered it, asked me what I wanted to drink along with it, as the special meals are served before the regular meal service start, asked me afterwards how I liked it, and how I had found out about the offer.
With LH, an obviously unimpressed flight attendant showed up at my seat row and asked who had ordered the special meal. As I made myself known, he dropped the tray on my tray table and rushed off. I was left with the choice of either enjoying my dinner without anything to drink at all, or wait for the drinks cart and let the food grow cold.
By the time the drinks cart came by, I had finished my meal already. When the empty trays were collected, no one asked me how I liked it.
And that's LH in a nutshell for you. They give rats ass about their clients. Pay, board, sit down, shut up. Oh, you paid for an extra? Here it is. Now shut up again.
It's these small details that matter. Other than that, there was nothing to complain. The aircraft had LH's newest cabin, which actually is an improvement over the old one. I had lots of space, flight was on time, all okay.
Same for the leg back - had ordered (and gotten) the exact same seats, flights were on time. LH still flies out of ALA at 0400 in the morning. Horrible time. You have dinner by around 1900, then try to get 2-3 hours of sleep before heading to the airport. By the time the flight is in the air, most pax won't have eaten for 10 hours.
Still, LH serves no meal on that 7 hour flight. Not even a snack. Nothing. Only 1 hour before landing, they serve what passes as breakfast with LH. Choice is between a savoury omelette and a sweet pancake. After half the rows, they are out of omelette. Who would have thought that people who haven't eaten in then 15-16 hours prefer savoury over sweet...
I have sent LH so many messages over this. But hey... who cares what the customers think, right?
Anyway, so much about the ALA trip, and while the experience was not fantastic, it wasn't horrible either.
So I booked another trip with LH a month later. And got the horrible experience.
The theory:
HAM-FRA, A321
FRA-JFK, B748
EWR-MUC, A359
MUC-HAM, A320
The practice:
HAM-FRA, A321 - okay, that part worked. Paid for an exit row seat, got infinite legroom. Flight left 15 minutes late, but that's no biggie, we'd still touch down in FRA in time. And we better would be, as I only had a 65 minute layover, and had to pass passport control and TSA pre-check at FRA. No idea why LH sells these tight connections (I booked straight through their website), but they did - the HAM-FRA flight an hour earlier was not offered to me.
Touching down bang on time we did. But then we sat on the apron forever, as our gate wasn't free. Took FRA half an hour to assign a new one, which was A01. My departure gate was Z54. By the time I was off the plane, I had 25 minutes left, and my flight to JFK was already boarding.
Still made it, though, as A01 and Z54 are, surprisingly enough, almost next to each other. Passport control was empty, and TSA pre-check was the quickest I ever had:
TSA: "Sir, you're late, your flight is already boarding!"
Me: "I know, my inbound was late."
TSA: "Okay, let's cut this short then. How long will you stay in the US?"
Me: "10 days."
TSA: "You got ESTA?"
Me: "Yup."
TSA: "Have a nice flight, sir!"
If only things could always be that easy.
A short sprint later, I was at the gate, and among the last passengers to board the flight to JFK.
That was indeed operated by a 747-8i. Yay, new sub-type for me!
And boy, was that a disppaointment. LH got the new cabin, but with old IFE. These stone old "touch" screens that aren't bigger than my smartphone screen, but have a much lower resolution, and won't respond to any touch unless you hammer on them with a fist.
Add LH's dreaded sardine-can layout, and you have a claustrophobic experience. When the pax in front of me reclined their seatback, the IFE screen is about 15cm from my face. How any person above 175cm can fit into these seats is a miracle to me. I stand 174cm "tall", and I was miserable.
Shame that the Queen of the Skies doesn't get a better treatment from LH.
The flight itself was okay. We left the gate over 30 minutes late due to delayed baggage - which was good news to me, as that gave FRA plenty of time to get my bag on board. The app also informed me that my bag had been "accepted" for the flight, so all was well, right?
Wrong.
We arrived at JFK on time, but then had to wait forever on the apron, as our gate wasn't free. Where had I heard that before? By the time it was free, all hell broke loose. NY had a severe weather warning on place, and they sure meant it. It started raining heavily, with lightning bolts going down left and right. After waiting for another 30 minutes, we had to get towed into the gate.
Anyway, we made it! I was finally in New York City.
Alas, my bag was not.
We had been informed that it would take a while for our bags to show up, as the rampers couldn't start unloading the plane before the thunderstorm had passed. Fair enough. So after waiting for some 45 minutes, the belt finally started moving, and bag after bag appeared.
Until, after some 10 minutes, no more bags appeared, but a lot of people were still at the carousel. An airport employee asked us what flight we had been on. LH404? All bags from that one have been delivered, go see that LH employee at the back of the hall.
And there he was. Standing a good way away from the carousel, with a large sign in his hands, showing the names of some 25 pax whom LH already knew would be missing their bags.
How much does an airline have to hate their passengers if they leave them standing at the carousel for an entire hour, waiting for a bag that LH already knows will never come?
And why on earth were 25 pax missing their bags, when boarding in FRA had been completed in time, but we then waited 30 minutes on the ground for the last bags to be delivered?
Anyway, I couldn't do anything else than grind my teeth, fill out a lost bag report, receive my amenities kit (some toiletries and an XXL t-shirt) and be on my way.
I always have a set of fresh underwear in my carry-on, so I'd survive the next morning. And latest in the afternoon, my bag would be there, right?
Wrong. Again.
My bag did arrive with LH400 at 1340 local time. LH had told me that they will need 2-4 hours for customs clearance and delivery. So it should arrive at my place before 1800 latest. I found all that out by calling LH several times, as nobody had been calling me.
By 1630, I started to get a little nervous. The agent at the LH USA hotline gave me the telephone number of the courier service that would bring my bag. That courier service was the only helpful entity in this drama. Even though I could tell they had their hands full, they went ABCD to help me, even called me proactively, several times.
Only they couldn't help me, as they still had not received the bag from LH. LH's hotline disputed that, but I believed the courier service more. I even tried LH's German hotline, but that's an exercise in futility these days - there are literally hundreds of complaints on social media that no one will answer these calls, even after 2 hours of being exposed to their horrible elevator music. I gave up after 1 hour.
So I tried the US hotline again. "Sir, I can see you have called about this before", said a guy with a thick Indian accent, that made me doubt his name was really Mike.
Of course I had been calling before. I was still missing my bloody bag! "Sir, you have to be more patient and understanding", Mike lectured me. "We have a lot of lost bags at the moment. We cannot deliver them all straight away. Especially on a weekend. It is difficult to find a courier then."
Dafuq do I have to understand?? That these clowns can't get their bloody job done? I rarely raise my voice against hotline people, as they usually didn't cause the problem. But in this case, I think I made myself quite clear that Mike and me would probably not become best friends that night. OTOH, his attitude fits LH quite nicely. Who cares if the paying customer is still in the clothes he was flying in, 24 hours after arrival? It's LH that needs understanding, not the pax.
At 2300, the courier service called me and confirmed that they had finally received the bag from LH. An e-mail from LH confirming the same came 5 minutes later, proving that I was right to trust the courier service more than LH's US hotline.
They even gave me the driver's phone no., as I wasn't home by that time, so that I could make sure he dropped the bag with the right doorman. There really is not a single bad thing I can say about Queens Conveyance LLC. Shame they don't operate TATL flights.
Anyway - my bag and me were finally reunited the next morning. I had already been shopping by that time, and just sent LH the bill before writing this TR. Let's see if they will cover it.
I spent another wonderful day in NYC - what a great city! Never had been there before, but truly fell in love with it.
On Monday, I flew from JFK to BUF, to join a corporate meeting at my new company's hq. I chose DL for that leg, and despite having to endure 75 minutes on a CR9, it still was a great experience. DL have a thing called curbside check-in at JFK. Uber drops you off, and a friendly DL agent literally takes your bag out of the trunk and checks it in for you right there on the spot.
Service on board was also great, the flight attendant seemed to have a great day and showered us with snacks and funny comments. It was the only time during this trip that I really felt welcome onboard an aircraft.
Nope, didn't do so on the flight back to LGA either. It got cancelled, as NYC was once again experiencing heavy weather. Don't wanna fly a CR9 when going through a nice front of downburst goodness, so I don't blame them. They had no more flights to NYC that day, so they offered us either a flight via DTW the next morning (yeah... no), or a 50% refund on the entire ticket's costs (including fees and taxes). Which I found quite generous, as technically, they wouldn't have had to refund anything. My business partner having gold status with them certainly helped, but still, a nice move.
We had almost expected the flight to get canxed, so we were prepared - a rental car and a nice 7 hour drive it was. Straight through the weather that had led to our flight getting cancelled. Joy. But we made it. Going by what we saw whenever the weather cleared up a little bit, upstate NY and Pennsylvania are rather nice. I also liked Buffalo a lot, btw.
Back in NYC, I had 2 more days for sightseeing and party goodness, before my flight back home to Germany. At least I would get to fly the A359, that might make up for some of the disappointment on the inbound leg, right?
Wrong.
So I got that e-mail from LH, informing me that me reserved (and paid-for) premium seat on the EWR-MUC leg wasn't available anymore, because of an equipment change.
Checked the app. A346. Oh do f*ck off, LH!
A quick check on FR24's flight history reveals that this was the only day in some 2 months that LH413 was not operated by an A359.
But at least, LH was very proactive this time. Without me even asking, their website informed me that the reservation fee for my premium seat was not refundable, as my entire ticket was not refundable, either.
So LH is capable of thinking ahead, reading customers' minds and being proactive. At least as long as it's about protecting their bottom line.
And it got even better. A few hours later, another e-mail arrives. My booked (and paid-for) premium seat (exit row this time) on the MUC-HAM leg wasn't available anymore, either.
Again, due to an equipment change.
Equipment before: A320
Equipment after: A320
And yes, it gets still better! Jumping ahead in the narration a little, when I boarded that flight, it turns out they had given my seat to an 8 year old girl. Who, as the f/a was quick to explain to her and her parents, was not even allowed to sit in an exit row, so they had to swap seats with other pax. Not me, obviously.
I hate LH, and they hate me right back.
But back to the sequence of things - EWR-MUC was delayed by an hour, due to a late inbound. Flight itself was okay. The A346 still had the old cabin, that's even more claustrophobic than the new one on the 748, as the seats are bulkier. Legroom was miserable. But to my surprise, that cabin had the new, tablet-like IFEs. The only thing I could not complain about on this flight.
The food, however...
Chicken or pasta was the choice. I went for pasta. I don't trust airline chicken, pasta is the safer option, right?
Wrong!
I spent a good portion of the second half of the flight admiring the downstairs lavatories in all their glory. I just barely avoided throwing up. Now, in all fairness, I don't know if it really was the pasta. I had been at a party in Jersey City before the flight, and had plenty of food there. But everybody else at the party had it as well, and nobody got sick.
The state of the lavs did not exactly improve my well-being either. They looked (and smelled) downright filthy. EK f/as clean the lavs every 2 hours during a flight. Just saying. But hey, why would you clean the lavs if you hate your pax anyway...
We arrived at MUC with 20 minutes of delay remaining. That made my connection yet another challenge, as my layover was a whooping 45 minutes this time. Still made it, despite having to make another stop at the lavs between the gates.
So I completed the leg on the A320, admiring how LH gave the seat I had paid for to a little girl, and then to another pax, as little girls aren't even allowed to sit in exit rows.
I had hoped my bag would have been left behind in MUC, as then LH could have hauled my overweight bag full of dirty laundry to my doorstep. But no, they didn't even grant me that small favour. After surprisingly little waiting time (okay, another extensive toilet break gave HAM's ground handlers enough time to offload the aircraft), my bag was one of the first ones to arrive on the carousel.
So I had to drag it all the way to the taxi stand. And in the taxi on the way home, I had time to think if I would fly LH again.
I still haven't decided.
Ideology: The mistaken belief that your beliefs are neither beliefs nor mistaken.
That's funny right there.
. On a positive note, I absolutely love the architecture of the old terminal 1, seeing that place in some movies when I was a kid is probably one of the reasons I'm into aviation today...
