Hello and thanks in advance for helping me. I'm new to international travel and I have a few questions about an upcoming trip to Europe. I booked airfare through Expedia for a United Airlines trip that drops me in Brussels but I depart from Prague 14 days later. There are no issues with he United flights. I'm set with seat reservations to Brussels. The confusion is with the return flights on Lufthansa. Both with the short hop from Prague to Frankfurt, and with the long leg back to Denver from there. I'm tall, so I booked Premium Economy for a bit more leg room, but I'm unable to select my seats for Lufthansa. The Cust. Serv. rep tells me "the ticket has not yet been issued, so you can't select your seats". I've also received lots of contradicting info from Expedia and Lufthasa. Each telling me that the other will book my seats. Seems to me, it would be Lufthansa, but I'm guessing that using Expedia has fort of muddied the waters here. I'm wondering if anyone can walk me through the process of seat reservation with Lufthansa? Will I indeed need to wait until I check-in, 23 hours from take-off before I can select a seat? And would I reserve seats online as part of the check-in process? One more question; apparently Lufthansa has something called "automatic check-in". What exactly is this since it seems I'd still need to actually check-in myself, particularly if I'm needing to select my seats. Sorry for the newbie stuff here, but I've been waiting for this trip for quite some time and I'd like to make it as seamless as possible. Thank you!
Help! Newbie quetions about traveling on Lufthansa
- Thread starter Spauld
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Thanks eolesen. I wasn't aware that it was Expedia that issues the ticket. I assumed it was LH. Nobody at Expedia seems to know what I'm talking about when I tell them that I can't request seats until they issue the ticket. The Expedia customer service reps keep trying to send me to the United site to book seats, or the LH website or they say "it will probably be about 1 week before the ticket is issued, try back then". Valuable lesson learned to NOT book through Expedia for future trips.
I travel internationally a lot and find its always best to go directly to the airlines web sites for booking. Then you can be ticketed and get seating at that time for that sites own flights. However if you had booked this through United, even with the same itinerary, they would not have been able to book your seats on Lufthansa, even though they are all part of the same Global alliance. They will tell you what the record locator is on Lufthansa and you can then go to the Lufthansa site and try to book seats. But Lufthansa, BA, and many other airlines will often not let you book seats before checkin for the first leg on them--with BA I know that's true even on flights booked with them in business class! BTW you might want to have a back-up for Lufthansa; their pilots were on strike this past weekend, with more promised in the near future. We flew out of Berlin on Monday but were on BA, thank goodness.
