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Miles & More, the frequent flyer scheme for Lufthansa, Austrian, Swiss, etc, has many unappealing features compared to other loyalty schemes: high taxes and surcharges on redemptions, a nasty expiry policy and no household accounts/mileage pooling (read this post for why collecting can still be worthwhile though).
Miles & More has now announced that mileage pooling will be introduced on the eve of the scheme’s 25th anniversary in May. According to the press release (German only), up to two adults and five children will be able to pool their miles. We don’t know much more beyond that as of now.
Bottom line
Although this is by no means as generous as the BA Executive Club Household Accounts, where you can pool miles with extended family, this is a genuine enhancement to Miles & More:
- You should be able to redeem miles for worthwhile awards much quicker now. Remember that you currently only need 55k Miles & More points for a business class return flight to LA.
- Third-party promotions will become more appealing. For example, if you have already bagged the 13,000 bonus miles available to new users of the M&M hotel booking platform, you can now use your partner’s (and perhaps children’s) account to trigger the bonus again – and pool the miles.
Wow! You hardly ever hear good news from Miles and More!
Great news!
So this is O/T, but on the topic of family pooling.. I’m flying Delta with my family at the end of this month. I’d prefer to credit miles to Alaska, Air France or Virgin but I don’t think any of them do family pooling. Are there any Delta partners that do?
(Virgin would if I was gold..but I have no status there)
Otherwise them there miles are all going to go to waste.. help!
The Alaska / Delta partnership is dead anyhow…
I believe Korean does family pooling, but the Asian airlines can be quite strict about providing proof of family ties.
The other option is to simply get each family member started in this hobby and credit the miles to a programme with a relatively benign expiration policy.