Trip Report: Adventures with Lufthansa – To FTU Amsterdam

Adventures with Lufthansa – To FTU Amsterdam

• Would I like to speak at FTU? Umm. Yes! (This section)
• To the airport, LH953 Birmingham to Frankfurt
• An (un)expected extended layover
• LH996 Frankfurt to Birmingham (Business Class)
  
• The Park Inn Amsterdam Schiphol Airport
• Speaking at FTU Amsterdam
• LH997 Amsterdam Schiphol to Frankfurt Main
  
• What is the meaning of the words “Reasonable Connection” at Frankfurt?
• LH958 Frankfurt to Birmingham 
• Learning goes both directions

As I came to end of a conference some months ago, I was talking with people, and a question popped up – would I be interested in speaking at Frequent Traveler University Amsterdam?

I threw out a few subject ideas, and that pleased the organisers enough to sign me up. A short time later, my picture appeared on the site

With that, it was time to head home, and start writing slide decks – as well as arguing with myself on what I actually was going to talk about. With knowledge of Avios, Star Alliance and my taste for mad mileage runs, I certainly have enough to talk about. In the end, I started knocking up some slide decks that made sense to me.

However, whilst coming up with the talk, I had taken my eye off the ball when coming to booking off the ticket.

As I wanted to minimise the time away from home (believe it or not, life is very busy at the moment – the joy of being an Infrastructure Engineer who fiddles with computers), I needed to constrain the time off I had. This meant striking off trips via London or Manchester, but rather from my local airport – Birmingham Airport. That’s no bad thing as it seems I’m utilising my local airport more and more this year… and providing valuable passenger traffic and taxes to keep it afloat.

There are two main ways between Birmingham and Amsterdam – direct with KLM and indirect with Lufthansa. However, with my usual lack of planning – prices had been jumping pretty high, to the point where a direct return was coming up the best part of £230, whilst the Lufthansa version was coming up a lot less – £175. Combine that with a Lufthansa £15 voucher, the pendulum fell towards Lufthansa to carry me back and forth across Europe.

Booking the ticket wasn’t difficult – the most difficult part was remembering my Miles and More number. And considering I had very few places where it was stored (as the Lufthansa sites store the numbers in an encrypted form, the emails have the last 4 numbers in them… and the lack of not getting a single mile from Lufthansa (let alone the paltry 125 miles I’d get normally), was just wrong.

So where did I find my number? That’s right – buried in my Swiss.com profile.

Non stop trouble finding your Miles and More number? Check.

Thankfully, my Miles and More card is still on the last bit of being in the FTL Membership (as part of a mileage run I did on Swiss many moons ago), so there would be something if the worst did happen.

With that done, and tickets in the purchased state, I settled back down to writing the slide decks. In some cases the slide decks weren’t finished until about 10 minutes before the presentation (namely as I changed my mind with the content… which with a short while to go before presenting… isn’t a good thing)

So with the run being a simple on through Frankfurt, with a laughable 45 minute connection on the way out of through Frankfurt, and a more relaxed 1 hour 30 on the way…

Who can sniff chaos a mile off?

Looks ever so simple doesn’t it? Birmingham to Amsterdam via Frankfurt. Maps generated by the Great Circle Mapper – copyright © Karl L. Swartz

Yes. So do I.

Settle back, as I turn some boring Intra-European flights into something hilarious, comical and a lesson never to book a connection at Frankfurt-am-Main that doesn’t at least have two hours in it.

Full Disclosure: Frequent Traveler University kindly paid for my hotel stay at the Park Inn Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, as well as entry into Frequent Traveler University Amsterdam Autumn 2014. The views of the event are the authors own, and are an independent viewpoint of the events of the weekend.

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