Lufthansa review by Thomas 2016-09-04

I bought a return flight from New Zealand to the UK with Lufthansa, and broke the journey for 3 days in San Francisco. Due to my own poor planning I arrived at the check in desk at SF 45 minutes before the flight and was denied boarding (their cut off is 60 minutes) which wasn't great but is fair enough. They stated that the rest of my return flight was unaffected, and that I only had to pay for a new flight from San Francisco to London. However, 2 days before my return flight from the UK to New Zealand, I contacted then to confirm everything was OK and they said I now had to pay a $4466 reissuing fee, 3 times the original price of the ticket and over 5 times the cost of buying the same flight with a different airline with 3 days notice, which is what I chose to do instead in the end. This is a short summary of a very stressful time with innumerable call centre staff members, all of which seemed perfectly polite and continuously gave me conflicting information as to whether I had a valid ticket or not, and every single one of the interactions generated no paper trail or email correspondence. They just left me stranded in a completely unreasonable way.