Category: Computer Software

Claiming missing airline reward miles was covered in four previous articles on this website now, but here’s a twist to that process that makes me revisit this topic one more time.

The first article in the series dates back to August 2010 and compared the workflows for claiming uncredited airline reward miles between Lufthansa’s Miles & More program and British Airways’ Executive Club.¹

At the time, I did put in a claim for uncredited miles with Lufthansa, but did not have any similar request for British Airways. Thanks to my parents being on British Airways flights before signing up for BA’s loyalty program, I finally did get to test the entire process with an actual mileage claim.

Method A: “Type a lot, wait a couple of weeks, and then we’ll see what happens.”

As a quick reminder, here’s the online form that Lufthansa requires you to fill out for claiming yet-uncredited reward miles:

It is safe to assume that, like any other airline, Lufthansa keeps old booking records. With the ticket number serving as a unique identifier, why then are you required to fill in seven fields?

Method B: “Enter one number. Done!”

British Airways’ form requests that you enter exactly one data item which is, of course, the ticket number.

When I tried this last time with a ticket number whose associated flights had already credited to my account, the website listed the respective flights’ miles as having been “[c]laimed previously through British Airways.”

My parents’ newly created accounts had a mileage balance of exactly zero when I brought up the claim form this time. Entering a ticket number brought up a table of flights that was similar to the one I had seen previously.

The status, however, was now given as “Gewährte Gutschrift”: “Credit Granted”.

Clicking the “Konto ansehen” (“View Account”) button took me back to the account’s main page, and the balance now showed a non-zero amount.

Not only was it enough to enter just the ticket number; the respective reward miles were credited immediately without any wait time!

The possible impact of claiming miles from a partner airline

The mileage credit I had requested from Miles & More had been for a partner airline, and not for a flight with Lufthansa themselves. This may explain why it took a few weeks to see those miles added to my account.

It does not explain, however, why Lufthansa generally insists that you enter multiple redundant data items, whereas British Airways impressively demonstrates that this process works just fine if all you have is the ticket number.

Back in August 2010 I had tested how you can claim missing airline reward miles via the websites of Lufthansa and British Airways, respectively. Just recently I was on two flights with United airlines, for which I still need to claim my reward miles. This made for the perfect opportunity for a follow-up on this topic.

Alas, in the almost one-and-a-half years since, almost nothing has changed.

The same-old, same-old (both good and bad)

British Airways rebranded their miles to “Avios”, so the wording of the link for claiming un-credited miles may just be that little bit less intuitive now. It is still in the same convenient location, though.

On Lufthansa’s Miles & More website, the previous text-only navigation menu has been replaced with a set of icons that mimic the look-and-feel of the iPhone’s Launchpad. In that menu, the “Request Miles” link/icon combo is a bit easier to find.

Unfortunately, my key complaint still applies: Where British Airways is happy to ask for just the ticket number to get the claim process started, Lufthansa still requires you to fill out this extensive form:

Obviously, such minor changes alone would not justify writing about this topic again. The serious new problems I experienced with the Miles and More website now are well worth sharing with you, though.

Unknown #1: The flight class

The form requires picking a booking class. That information is not found on the boarding pass, but according to the confirmation email, the classes for my two flights were “G” and “K”, respectively.

Surprisingly, the popup menu does not offer the former at all:

Since the second flight was listed as a “K” class, I simply selected that class for the first flight as well.

Unknown #2: The flight number

On the boarding pass, the flight number is stated as “UA1555Y”. Nevertheless, the Miles & More website considers this number invalid:

Admittedly, this problem is not directly linked to the website’s design. In fact, the error message is displayed prominently, and thanks to the high-contrast highlighting, it’s easy to find the field whose entry needs fixing. Also, in the confirmation email, the flight number is listed without the trailing “Y”.

Nevertheless, this is something that the website could take care of automatically: it could silently discard the offending character, or at least offer via a dialog box to fix this, saying something like: “The flight number ‘UA1555Y’ you have entered is invalid. Did you mean ‘UA1555’?”.

In this instance, it was easy to correct “my” mistake, but the biggest problem was yet to come.

Unknown #3: The airline code (Say what?!)

After hitting return, the form came back with the following error messages:

None of the form fields was highlighted, so it was impossible to tell which data item needed to be modified to make the website accept my input.

The only thing I could think of was to add the airline code to the flight number. Unfortunately, entering “UA268” instead of “268” did not help, as the site now complained about an invalid flight number.

If you think about it, the ticket number should be perfectly sufficient to verify a mileage claim. This is especially true if the ticket was purchased directly from a partner airline’s website.

Instead, you have to meticulously and manually copy a whole bunch of data from the boarding passes into the form. And once you did, you may very well be confronted with an error that you, as the user, cannot fix, but that stubbornly prevents you from submitting said data.

So I’m stuck now. And used the only option I had.

I’ve contacted Lufthansa via their website’s contact form and hope they will tell me what to do next. Who knows: Maybe they will even take the time to explain the problem to me.

As soon as I hear back from them, I’ll update this post. Stay tuned!

Twitter is joining the group of companies that aim to track their users’ every website visit. In this case, the tracking is supposed to serve as the foundation for “tailored suggestions” about whom to follow on Twitter.

I prefer not to be tracked this way, so I consider it a good thing that you can opt-out from this feature, if you prefer that your web habits not to be tracked.

The bad thing is that the opt-out checkbox is missing from my settings page. In its place is a note that this feature is not available to me.

A similar note appears when I visit my Web Personalization Preview:

If things remained as they are right now, I’d be perfectly happy. Alas, the note on the Preview page includes the word “currently”, so this feature may be enabled for my account in the future.²

If I were seriously paranoid about Twitter tracking my web visits, I’d have to regularly check my preferences on the Twitter website, just in case the feature is enabled, and Twitter would not notify me about it.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could simply opt-out right now?

Right now, I know that Twitter is working on a feature called “tailored suggestions”; that I do not want to use that feature; and that I (will) have to opt-out from it. Right now, I’m also viewing my Twitter Settings page. So, if that checkbox were available right now, even though the feature isn’t, I’d be done dealing with tailored suggestions for good. Right now.

As it is, though, I will have to wait and see whether this feature will become available and, if so, hope that Twitter will notify me about it — or that I remember to check the site myself every now and then, lest I be tracked after all.