This Scam Reveals Why First-Class Tickets Don't Come With Lounge Access

Here’s one reason a first-class airline ticket won’t automatically get you into the swank airport lounge. A man of infinite gall feasted for free 35 times in a year at Lufthansa’s Munich airport lounge without actually taking a flight, exploiting the change rules on a business-class ticket he had bought.

A German court ordered the man to repay Lufthansa €1,980 ($2,710), or about €55 for each time he visited the lounge. The man had bought a single ticket for about €744 and changed the date of travel repeatedly, exploiting the flexibility offered by that fare class. The airline canceled the ticket after more than a year and refunded the money. “Lufthansa pursued a prosecution only after the man bought the second ticket with the intention of resuming his foraging raids,” Bloomberg News reporter Richard Weiss wrote on Wednesday.