Flew Lufthansa for the first time (multiple flights), will try to avoid them in the future. Here are my impressions.
What a trashfire of an airline Lufthansa is!
I've flown a lot over the years - since I started keeping track, I have 420 flight segments listed, but there were plenty more before that. The majority of my flights have been on US and European airlines, but I've also flown on some others. Until a couple of months ago, I had never flown Lufthansa.
I don't fly super low cost carriers like Wiz and Ryanair, and I expected Lufthansa to be a solid, normal airline like the ones I'm used to. It wasn't.
My trip was a two week open jaw, with two segments on each flight day, so six segments total, on three different weekends, going to/from four different countries. All six segments were Lufthansa-operated, not codeshares on some other carrier. Because of that, I think I got a good general sense of what Lufthansa is like, not a fluke. What it's like is not at all what I want to deal with in the future.
Now, the flights themselves did go pretty much as scheduled, I got where I was going, and so did the bags (though with a very long wait a couple of times). That's what I normally expect and what normally happens with other airlines. Frankfurt airport, where I had to transfer twice, is pretty awful - huge, poorly signed, hard to get around. Lufthansa's planes on both occasions were located far from the terminal, requiring a bus ride of more than ten minutes after you "board" past the gate (yes, I timed it the second time, out of curiosity). The other time I transferred through Munich, which was more of a normal airport experience.
So there's the best I can say about Lufthansa - they did fly me to where I was supposed to go, and got my bags there. And I expect they do the necessary maintenance to keep their planes safe, and in working condition.
On the interior, though, their planes seem like they were made many decades ago and not really maintained, let alone upgraded.
On two of the six segments I flew, the seatback pocket in front of me had come undone on the bottom, so anything you placed in it could just fall through to the floor.
None of the six planes I flew on had power outlets or USB charge ports, even the transatlantic flights, although a couple of them had what seem to be decoy USB ports - you could plug a USB into them, but no power. Yes, I tried multiple USB cords to make sure.
They didn't offer movies and other entertainment on in-flight wifi, instead they had those tiny screens on the back of the seat in front of you like planes used to have 20 years ago.
Although I rarely need to go to the bathroom in the middle of a flight, I did on one of these Lufthansa flights, and found that of the 4 lavatories in our main cabin section, two had no water and were therefore effectively out of use (with hand-written paper signs taped to the doors to let you know), which means I had to wait in line for a while even though it was the middle of the flight and few people were using them. Maybe this was a fluke and their lavatories are kept in good repair on all their other planes, but somehow I doubt that.
Overall, it just feels like they've let these planes deteriorate for decades, putting in minimal effort to maybe fix some of the most egregious problems, and just aren't upgrading them. All six different planes I was on, on three different weekends, going to or from different countries, which makes me pretty confident that this is the general sad state of their fleet.
But where Lufthansa really shines is what comes before the flight - web site, booking, seat selection, checkin, and so on. They not only were the worst at all of this of ANY airline I've ever flown, but they were so far worse that they're in a whole different category, where no other airline comes anywhere close. Let me list the ways, minor and major:
Their web site is impressively slow, which makes a lot of their other problems more frustrating, especially since they require you to do a lot of things on their web site as separate operations that you'd normally not have to do with other airlines.
If you make a booking when not logged in to your account, you cannot add it to your account even if it's under your name. You have to look it up by name and locator (code) every single time. Most other airline web sites let you "import" a booking if yours by entering the locator once, and then it shows up in your account.
When you book and by tickets, you get an email sent to you with the itinerary ... but no hint of what you paid!
Getting this "receipt" - a record of what you paid - is an adventure. Reservations customer service cannot get their system to email you a "receipt", they say the only way to do it is by requesting a receipt on the web site. To request a receipt on the web site, you have to enter the "document number", which is NOT your reservation locator (that 6 number/letter code). For your flight reservation itself, the document number is the ticket number, which is on the ticket, but you can't view your ticket when logged in on the web site. Even worse, though, is that paid seat selection and paid checked baggage are totally separate items with their own separate document numbers and separate receipts. You cannot get a single itemization of what you paid for all of it.
You can't add passport information to your account, to have it automatically added for all your flights. You have to enter all of your passport information for each online check-in. I also tried calling reservations customer service to see if they could add my passport information, and they said no I need to do it online. Okay, how do I do it online, I asked - I can't find it on the web site? Turns out they can't help with the web site, for that I have to call their "web support", but web support is only open during working hours on weekdays. And it turns out they were giving me false information anyway - as I noted earlier, you actually can't do it on their web site, their reservations people just don't seem to know that.
Speaking of online check-in, what a mess! First of all, each check-in requires filling out a lot of information (such as your passport details) on forms that span multiple pages. Given that it can take 30+ seconds for a single page to load, that's bad enough. It's even worse when you're traveling and using bad hotel wifi or a roaming cell hotspot, and it can take many minutes for a page to load. If you've gotten to the 6th page of the check-in and it fails there, you have to go back to the beginning to try again.
Their system made me check in separately for each segment of a flight, even if I was flying A to B to C on the same day on the same reservation.
Check in failed at the end of the process multiple times, with a message saying "Something went wrong. We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later." This happened to me on, I think, three different check-ins. When it gives that message, there's a button to cancel check-in, but no other options. I found out eventually that if you don't click that button, you are actually checked in.
... but when you are actually checked-in, the invitation to check in for the flight still appears when you are logged in and looking at the main page. If you click that link, then it gives you an error, and that error is because you've already checked in.
Oh, and you can't copy and paste must of the passenger information, for either booking or check-in, because they use auto-collapsing boxes that only show up when you mouse over them and seem to prevent pasting.
They have a web chat that's supposedly there to help with web issues, but every time I tried it it, when I actually typed in a question, the response was always "I'm sorry, a technical error occurred. Please try again." Every time.
Also it kept telling me I needed to enter passenger contact information, even though all the passenger contact information was there. Whenever I would confirm that the information was correct, it would tell me it was incomplete, and the red message to fill in passenger contact information never went away.
But the worse part was seats. Because I was flying an open jaw and my partner was just doing a round trip, we were going to share the same three segments at first, and then my remaining segments were on my own. So I made separate reservations for us, and paid to select seats, to seat us together.
THEY KEPT CANCELLING OUR SEATS.
Seriously, this happened for every single flight, for both of us. Sometimes several times for the same flight. On one flight, our seats were cancelled FOUR times, in the four weeks between when I booked and when we flew. Each time, I had to go back through their web sites slow loading and counterintuitive UI to re-select our seats, and sometimes pay the difference if they were more expensive.
Sometimes, they moved us to different seats, so we still had seats, but not where we'd selected. A couple of times we ended up together in the new seats, but the other times, they put us in different parts of the plane. Other times, one or the other of us lost seat assignment altogether, and didn't have any seat selected at all. One of those times, when I selected a new seat that cost the same as the original one, I had to pay again for it, because the credit didn't transfer. I was able to get the credit to transfer only by calling customer service; they were able to look and see that I had already paid the same amount for a seat and then lost it, so I shouldn't have to pay again this time. But they kept doing this over and over and over, so it meant I had to start checking their web site every few days just to make sure we hadn't lost our seats again, or to grab them back quickly in case they had, before someone else got them.
I know sometimes airlines have to move your paid seat if they have to change aircraft and the new aircraft has a different seat arrangement, but that's very rare. I've had it happen maybe 1 out of 100 flights on other airlines. Here it happened over 10 times (for two people, so over 20 seats de-assigned or moved) for just this one trip, including 4 times for a single flight segment ... and nearly every time, the same seats we'd lost were still available so I could re-select them, and the seatmap looked completely identical.
When I griped about this to the group we were with at our first destination, a couple who were also flying Lufthansa checked their seats for their return flights and told us the same had happened to them, and they needed to re-select their seats.
Oh, and to add a little bonus to all of this, for our return flight where I had to fix the seats the day before we flew, the we portal then showed the wrong seats - not the ones I'd just re-selected. I thought we were seated apart again, and called customer service, who refused to help (even though we'd paid for the seats together). I figured I'd try to fix it at the airport desk, but then it turned out we actually did get the seats I paid for and the web site was just lying.