Pay first and discover your destination later with Lufthansa

We’ve heard of flights to nowhere (which return to their point of departure), and we’ve just discovered that Lufthansa has also launched “mystery flights” whose destination you only discover at the last minute.

Mystery flights at Lufthansa

The principle is quite simple: on the promotion page you buy a ticket at a promotional fare for a given amount, and only at the end of the booking process do you find out what your destination is.

To avoid a Russian roulette effect, the German airline has grouped its destinations by theme. So you choose a theme with a certain number of destinations, and you’ll have a trip to a destination corresponding to the theme in question. A city can be in different themes.

So in the “Arts and Sights” category you can fly to Basel, Belgrade, Bilbao, Gothenburg, Luxembourg, Milan, Rome or Sofia.

At the time of booking, you can exclude cities from the list…and this increases the price.

What’s the logic behind mystery flights?

Of course, there’s a bit of marketing on the airline’s part, since there seems to be a clientele that likes this kind of “surprise” and to find out at the end where they’re flying to.

It’s also a clever way of optimizing aircraft load factors. Let’s imagine that everyone wants to go to Gothenburg and no one wants to go to Sofia… Such a system makes it easy to send people to Sofia or Basel who might otherwise have preferred to go to Gothenburg or Helsinki. This suggests that as soon as tickets for the booking classes concerned are sold out on one destination, passengers are redirected to others.

In any case, it’s a rather elegant way of telling the passenger “it’s more convenient for us that you go here than there”. So you’ll tell me that this is already the case with tickets in the cheapest booking classes: the airline puts them forward and when they’re all sold out, there are none left. And the customer is disappointed.

Here the customer will have a ticket, maybe not to the destination he prefers, but he’ll have one at this price…so less disappointment, at the price of a little sleight of hand.

What’s most surprising is that this offer has been around since 2016, but had never been noticed. Certainly, because it only concerns flights departing from Frankfurt or Munich.

Bottom line

Lufthansa allows passengers departing from Frankfurt or Munich to travel at promotional prices, provided they choose a theme embodied by several cities and know, after paying, to which city they will be flying.