Rebooking a flight? Check your fare class

QI am writing to you after three confusing phone calls with Lufthansa. Last March, we booked flights from Birmingham to Munich for a family skiing trip over this February half term. But because my two sons – aged seven and 12 – didn’t then meet the vaccination requirements to enter Germany, we were faced with cancelling the holiday.

We decided to postpone the trip until next Christmas and I looked at flights departing December 27 on Lufthansa’s website, which cost just over £800 for the four of us. I tried to change our tickets online but this wasn’t possible.

I phoned the airline’s service centre which said the tickets were valid for only a year so I would either have to travel before they expired on March 21 or pay £596 in addition to the £676 I had originally paid. Can this be correct? – Louise Moss

AI asked Lufthansa for an explanation because its website advertises “flexible and extended booking options” due to ongoing disruptions caused by the pandemic. So why did Ms Moss have to pay an extra £596 to rebook her four tickets, a total outlay of £1,272 compared with just £800 if she booked new tickets?

It took Lufthansa a month to get to the bottom of the issue. In the meantime, Ms Moss had to cancel the original flights to avoid becoming a no-show on February 12 and rebook them for a day in March to keep the booking live. Unlike most other airlines, Lufthansa does not issue vouchers.

Airlines have around 26 different fare classes for economy seats, designated by a letter of the alphabet. Each has different freedoms and restrictions. Lufthansa says that while travel dates can be changed numerous times and beyond the one-year validity of the ticket, the customer can only exchange the tickets for seats in the same fare class as that originally booked.

Ms Moss’s tickets are in the more expensive K and V fare classes, so she is allowed to rebook only in those categories. The increase in price compared with the original tickets is simply because the family will be travelling at a more expensive time of year.

However, Lufthansa appreciates that this is a big price hike and has agreed in this instance, as a gesture of goodwill, to waive the extra charges for rebooking over the New Year period. The airline says that only around half of its tickets can be rebooked online due to the limitations of its computer system, so many customers will have to phone its service centre to make changes like this.

iSlippery slope: a skiing trip to Germany was put on ice because reader Louise Moss’s sons didn’t meet the vaccination requirements