As I mentioned last week, I’m headed to Liverpool this week to meet my brother to see some football matches. It should be a great trip and of course, I wanted to fly over and back in style. It’s easier to find last minute award space for one person than multiple people so I assumed I would have a chance to find a seat in Lufthansa First Class for my flight over. I still have plenty of Avianca LifeMiles in my account from a prior canceled trip, and that is the most cost-effective way to book Lufthansa First Class (87k miles or sometimes less if you add a connection plus no added surcharges).

I have a few restrictions in my search though. I need to get to the Manchester, UK airport fairly early in the day as I am going to a match in Liverpool that night and don’t want to risk getting delayed and missing it. I also would like to be able to position to a Lufthansa US First Class gateway with a reasonable amount of miles or points. I’m not even going to consider flying back via Germany as the timing of when I would have to leave the UK is just too early in the morning.

It looked like there were three possible options for my outbound flight: Washington Dulles to Frankfurt, Newark to Frankfurt and JFK to Munich. These flights all leave in the early evening (5:30pm-6:00pm) and connect to a flight to Manchester that allows me to get there by noon and to Liverpool by 2pm in plenty of time for the match. They also had reasonable positioning options either through Delta or United.

As the booking window approached (Lufthansa has recently only been opening space about three days ahead of the flights), all options looked possible based on the number of First Class seats unsold. By this week, however, there were issues with space on the connection from Frankfurt to Manchester. The 11am flight was showing just about sold out and no partner award space was available. I turned my attention to the JFK-Munich routing. I saw available space yesterday including the connecting flight, so I tried to book. I got all the way through the booking page but the final confirmation button was greyed out. It took some investigation using ExpertFlyer to figure out that the Munich-Manchester flights for the day I needed them were all zeroed out of inventory by Lufthansa – not just award inventory, but all seats. You could not even pull them up on Google Flights. I have no idea why this is happening only for this one day. The day before and after had plenty of availability.

I tried again this morning when I saw that the Manchester-Munich flight was available again, but the same thing happened. I got all the way through, couldn’t book and when I looked again, the connection was zeroed out again.

So, it looks like I will be “slumming it” in American Airlines business class tomorrow night from JFK to London with a rushed terminal change at Heathrow to catch a British Airways connection to Manchester. I’ll try one more time this afternoon when I check in for my positioning flight on Delta, but it looks like Lufthansa First Class is not meant to be this time.

If you enjoyed this post (or have questions), let me know in the comments or send me an email at emptynestermiles@gmail.com. If you are thinking about opening a new credit card, please use one of my links.