It’s fitting that the return leg of our trip was as uncertain as the outbound during the Chicago snowstorm back on December 16th. Uncertain because we had planned to finally use our flight benefits and fly home standby on January 1st. We haven’t done that since 2011!
Historically New Year’s Day is an easy day to fly standby so it seemed like a good choice a few months ago. As our trip approached I had a game plan to get us home through Frankfurt where we had many more choices than we did out of Paris. In fact there were several flights that had dozens of seats open. But as we drew closer the choices got narrower and the best options suddenly didn’t look so great anymore. Right up until New Year’s Eve I thought we were going to make it.
Then something happened. Don’t know what, where, or when, but flights went south. United had 121 standbys listed for the five departures out of Frankfurt and those five had a grand total of negative 12 seats open. In other words all were now oversold plus there were 119 other travelers trying to get on.
Now sweating about getting out, I pulled a miracle out of the hat and got us two First Class seats on Lufthansa using miles.
So we went from nowhere to making plans to get to the world famous Lufthansa First Class Terminal early so that we could shower, have breakfast, generally hang out, and rest in Lufthansa’s warm and loving arms. No more standing around the gate hoping against hope that we’d get on! I’m pretty sure those 119 standbys will be there for days.
So at 6:30 on New Year’s Day morning we were rolling our bags out of the Hilton at Frankfurt Airport and walking over to the First Class Terminal. As we walked in we were greeted by our personal assistant Andrea. She would be taking care of us while we were at the FCT.
What is this First Class Terminal you ask? It’s a separate building from the main terminal at Frankfurt and you must be flying Lufthansa in First Class that day in order to access it.
It has shower rooms, nap rooms, cigar room, full service restaurant, it’s own duty free store, full service bar, rest areas and lounges, even a gummi bear bar!
You pass through security at the FCT, which as you can imagine is an entirely stress-free experience. If you’ve ever gone through security at the main terminal in Frankfurt you know that it would not be described as stress free. We were the only people going through security at 7:00, and once through Andrea took our passports so that she could take care of the EU exit process. We ran for the showers.
We purposely didn’t shower at the Hilton so that we could get the full FCT experience. And that was absolutely the right decision. The shower rooms were fantastic and made the whole day better today.
One of the perks of showering at the FCT is that they give you a rubber duckie to take home. These have become collectors items and Lufthansa had a special Christmas duckie for us when we left the shower area.
It was only 8:00 in the morning and we were being already giddy from being pampered. Next we stopped at the restaurant and had a little breakfast.
After breakfast we stopped at the gummi bear bar (come on!) and found some comfortable lounge chairs in which to wait for our 10:40 flight to Chicago. On our boarding cards it said that boarding was at 9:55.
You may recall that I mentioned that the FCT is a separate building from the main terminal. So how does one get from the FCT to your flight? You do it like this:
Easily one of the most luxe experiences we’re ever had. Being driven to the gate in a creamy Mercedes sedan and then taken up the back way to the aircraft door was nothing short of amazing. It renders you speechless because you can’t believe it’s happening while it’s happening.
For airplane geeks the views were tremendous.
We drove right in under the wing of our aircraft!
So now we’re firmly seated in our big, comfortable First Class chairs on a Lufthansa 747-800i awaiting deicing as it is snowing and 26 degrees in Frankfurt. Inflight pics in the next post.
