LUFTHANSA Group Introduces ‘AnyWay’
LH group announced a new way of booking trips to a limited group of destinations that help reduce your costs and add a bit of mystery to your trip.
The way it works is that you first tell LH the dates you want to depart and return on and then book your trip as usual. Two days before your departure, you’ll get an email from LH letting you know what flights you’ll be taking. Don’t fret, you’ll depart and return on the days you booked, but you might get some creative routing for the trip. Your flights will be operated by a combination of Lufthansa, SWISS, or Austrian aircraft.
This new program is dubbed ‘AnyWay’ and it covers travel from most of Lufthansa’s German gateways including Stuttgart, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin, Dusseldorf, and Leipzig. However, the ‘AnyWay’ concept only covers 10 destinations thus far: Miami, Bangkok, Mumbai, Dubai, Boston, Delhi, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Peking, Shanghai, and Tel Aviv.
Keep in mind that this is only available to Economy Class bookings made for travel on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
For your willingness to be this flexible, the fares will be a bit cheaper than the lowest prices usually offered on a given route. In most cases, I observed fares being €50 to €100 less.
Sounds like fun if you’re into saving a small bit of money, but there can be some consequences to being frugal…..
The biggest issue that I see and would have with this program is that you’ll be steered to aircraft that will already be near capacity and the airlines are trying to squeeze every last ‘sardine’ into the tin. What this might mean for you is that you may be stuck in a middle seat on a very overcrowded A340 aircraft as you jet off to Asia. Since you’ll be among the last passengers to be put on a flight, your odds of getting a good seat diminish dramatically. If you book for you and your family, your odds of sitting together all but vanish if the plane is full.
However, if you’re into sitting at the back of an A340 in the seat next to the stairs going down to lavatories, you’ll have virtually everyone sitting in coach walking past you at least twice during the flight so you might be able to make a few friends as a result! 😉
‘AnyWay’ is set to launch on October 23 and will be available for travel from Mid-December to Mid-March in most cases.
To learn more about the program and to book travel under ‘AnyWay’, please visit the AnyWay webpage. However as of this writing, it appears that the webpage is not yet functioning even though the launch was set for October 23.
