For those of you using Lufthansa’s “Blue Legends” App, I’ve updated the United and US Airways codeshare flight numbers that are valid for the month of February. Please note that Lufthansa does not have a codeshare flight number for every United or US Airways operated flight, but they do cover a large majority. If you are using older versions of Lufthansa codeshare flight numbers, please discard them. Lufthansa updates them on a monthly basis and previous codeshare flight numbers may be invalid.

For those of you not familiar with “Blue Legends”, it is a Lufthansa app that allows you to “Check In” with your various Lufthansa based activity; including flights, airport and lounge visits. The App lets you compete with other Lufthansa travelers in becoming “Mayors” of flights and receiving other “Badges” based on your accomplishments within Blue Legends. To learn more about “Blue Legends”, please click here.

PLEASE USE THIS LINK FOR LUFTHANSA’S UNITED AIRLINES CODE SHARE FLIGHT NUMBERS

PLEASE USE THIS LINK FOR LUFTHANSA’S US AIRWAYS CODE SHARE FLIGHT NUMBERS

Since Lufthansa launched BLUE LEGENDS, I’ve had many USA based users email me voicing their disappointment that they could not participate actively when flying on non Lufthansa operated flights in the USA. In order to “Check In” for a flight on Blue Legends, a Lufthansa flight number is required. This included codeshare flight numbers for flights operated by United and US Airways.

To that end, I’ve been able to assemble a complete list of codeshare flight numbers that Lufthansa uses for flights operated by United and US Airways. I’ve made these lists available as dedicated pages on my website. You can see it listed as “BLUE LEGENDS: Lufthansa Codeshare Flight Numbers For United Flights” and “BLUE LEGENDS: Lufthansa Codeshare Flight Numbers For US Airway Flights” under my “PAGES”.

There are a few things to keep in mind with these lists:

Lufthansa does not have a codeshare flight number for every United or US Airways operated flight.

Lufthansa updates their codeshare flight numbers monthly and I’ll update my list to reflect the changes (I’ll let you know when I’ve updated the pages)

The list only contains the LH codeshare flight number, origin and destination and does not contain departure or arrival time information. I’m working on adding that piece for future updates. For now I suggest you “Google” the LH codeshare flight number to make sure it corresponds to the actual flight you are on.

Over the coming weeks and months, Blue Legends is being enhanced and during this time, it is possible that not every Lufthansa codeshare flight number is in the Blue Legends database. If you find yourself unable to “Check-In” on Blue Legends for a specific flight, please let me know and I’ll forward that information to the developers.

If you are unfamiliar with Blue Legends, I encourage you to visit the app’s website or read my post on Blue Legends when it was first released in June.

If you have any questions or need help with Blue Legends, feel free to e-mail me or leave a comment on this post.

Thanks to the success of Lufthansa’s “SceneSpotter”, their social media team has decided to expand the project to now include cities from the United States and Asia. In the coming weeks Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Seoul will be added to represent Asia while New York, San Francisco and New Orleans will be added to represent the USA. As SceneSpotter grows, expect to see more cities added to the App.

For those of you not familiar with “SceneSpotter”, it’s a Facebook driven App that allows users to share and receive recommendations for their great places to visit when in a particular city. SceneSpotter encourages people to share favorite restaurants, shopping opportunities, cultural places of interest, family friendly activities, green-space and lodging suggestions.

What I really like about SceneSpotter is that it is not necessarily designed to cover the popular places for a given city. The strength and value of SceneSpotter is to provide you with places to experience that are off the beaten path and places not readily found in a tourist guide. After all, when visiting a new city for the first time, what fun is to go to places surrounded people from your home country, speaking your language? The beauty of travel is to discover the new and unique things, especially when they’re not spoiled by “tourist abuse”.

When SceneSpotter first rolled out, I was part of the Beta Testing team while we were building “content” for European cities. I’m really excited that the project has earned the ability to be expanded and I’m especially pleased that US cities are being introduced for the first time.

I’ve been working with Lufthansa’s Social Media team in building initial content for the rollout of the new cities and want to thank MilePoint.com’s Pat89339 for providing fantastic suggestions for San Francisco and Michael W. of “MichaelWTravels” for providing great ideas for New York City. Their contributions will really help the US cities get off to a fast start with their great recommendations.

As you read this, and have recommendations that you would like to share for Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul, Bangkok, New York, San Francisco and New Orleans, I ask that you PLEASE share them with me and I can forward the information to the programmers responsible for SceneSpotter. Ideally, we’re looking for ideas that are a bit off the “beaten path” and are favorites of your’s. If you’d like to share these places, please email them to me at lufthansaflyerblog@gmail.com and I’ll make sure they are added to the database of user recommendations. All I need is the name of the place and an address (if you have it) and a few words about why you’re recommending it.

If you have yet to experience SceneSpotter for yourself, I strongly encourage you to visit the SceneSpotter Page on Facebook and try it for yourself. It’s truly a great interactive tool that I think will help you as you plan your travels or if you want to leave your recommendations for others.

To learn more about SceneSpotter (including step by step directions in using it), you can read my post on it when it was first launched in July of this year.

If you have any questions or other comments regarding SceneSpotter, please email them to me or leave them in the comments section for this post and I’ll make sure that the Lufthansa Social Media Team receives them.

In this month’s edition of Lufthansa’s ‘Magazin’ App, Lufthansa gives us a behind the scenes tour of it’s fleet of aircraft. This “special edition issue” of the monthly electronic magazine walks readers through each of the 16 different type of aircraft currently in the Lufthansa fleet, including the iconic and still-operational Ju52.

Some of the great features in this issue include 360-degree panoramic views of cockpits and cabins, seat maps and description for each aircraft type that Lufthansa flies. The photos, as always, are fantastic and are unique to the App. You probably won’t find the photographs any where else.

Here are some screen shots from the FLEET SPECIAL edition of ‘Magazin’:

A thorough "virtual tour" is available for each aircraft type in the Lufthansa fleet

An example of a seat map illustration

An example of a 360 degree panoramic tour of a cabin (748's First Class cabin shown)

In addition to great photography and useful information, the app also has behind scenes perspectives for each of the aircraft. Focuses on maintenance, technology and human interest perspectives are found throughout the app.

An interesting feature of the FLEET SPECIAL issue is that it integrates scenes from the ‘Miniatur World’ located in Hamburg. Miniatur World is a fascinating place where you can see miniaturized worlds including a fantastic airport located in fictional “Knuffingen”. If you recall, I wrote about it a while back and you can learn more about it here.

I normally never suggest what anyone HAS to do when it comes to ideas and topics that I cover. But in this case, if you are a fan of aircraft and a fan of Lufthansa, you really should subscribe to the ‘Magazin’ App (it’s free) and enjoy some of the great content that is in there. This FLEET SPECIAL should provide that motivation!

I’ve made it easy:

Here is the link to the Apple App Store for Lufthansa Magazin

Last week while attending Lufthansa Group’s Annual Social Media Workshop in Frankfurt, I had the opportunity to gain insights into the Group’s Social Media programs and initiatives. The Workshop was attended by representatives from Lufthansa, Lufthansa Cargo, LSG SkyChefs, Lufthansa Systems, Germanwings, Austrian, Swiss, Brussels Airlines and Lufthansa Data Security. The session provided a platform for the companies to share their best practices, successes and opportunities that they see with Social Media and Corporate Communications. It also created a great environment for brainstorming and development of new ideas.

Being the only non-Lufthansa Group individual in the session, it gave me a great “fly on the wall” perspective to see how the various divisions approach their objectives when it comes to communicating with the public.

During my days in Frankfurt I also had the chance to catch up with TLGG (Torben, Lucie und die gelbe Gefahr), the firm behind many of Lufthansa’s online social media endeavors (SceneSpotter, Olympic Bingo, Euro Cup Bingo, MySkyStatus, Blue Legends, etc). TLGG’s Christoph Bornschein provided me with a few insights on what we can expect in the coming weeks and months:

Blue Legends:

This facebook based app creates a community where Lufthansa and other Star Alliance Airline passengers can “check in” via foursquare and earn various badges and awards based on their travel related activity (please note that “check-in” does not mean checking in for a flight). It’s a great way to keep track of your friends who fly Lufthansa and compete with them for Badges, Mayorships, etc. If you are not familiar with Blue Legends, please visit the Blue Legends Website to learn more and to sign up.

Blue Legends was launched earlier this year and has been working well. However, one issue has been the inability for Lufthansa codeshare flight numbers to work consistently within Blue Legends. For example if I am flying on United from Chicago to Los Angeles, there are usually multiple flight numbers (such as a Lufthansa codeshare flight number) for this flight in addition to United’s. In some cases, Blue Legends would not have the codeshare data in it’s database to allow for a foursquare “check-in” for the flight and have it register properly.

There is a fix to this bug on the horizon and we should see it sometime in early 2013. Lufthansa will be creating a dedicated IT (Information Technology) platform in January that will focus on consolidating and cross referencing flight data from flights that have a Lufthansa codeshare flight number. This deepened database should give users of Blue Legends the ability to check in with Lufthansa flight numbers, even when not flying on Lufthansa Aircraft. Great news for those of you that fly a variety of Star Alliance carriers.

MySkyStatus:

MySkyStatus is a useful tool that allows you to enter your flight information for any airline in the world and then have MySkyStatus share your flight status via Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or email. It’s a great way to keep your friends and family informed of your progress as you travel.

One issue with MySkyStatus has been it’s inability to correctly match certain flight numbers to certain routes. For example, I would enter a United flight number for Grand Rapids to Newark but MySkyStatus would think that the flight number was for a flight from Newark to Charlotte. The reason for this is that some airlines will use one flight number for a direct flight that involves two legs and MySkyStatus would only see one of the legs.

To help resolve this issue, it appears that MySkyStatus will at some point in the near future be integrated to work with AMADEUS data (PNR Locator, Itinerary reference etc). This will allow for the import of a traveler’s exact itinerary and should fix this minor glitch. Additionally, MySkyStatus will go through a minor facelift that will “modernize” it’s interface.

For more information on MySkyStatus, please visit the MySkyStatus website. Its a tool that I use on a regular basis.

Lufthansa announced today that their CloudStream product will be permanently taken off line on October 17. Users have until that date to log into their accounts and download their accumulated content before it is deleted.

For those unfamiliar with the platform, CloudStream was a “digital carry-on” application that allowed you to save content from the internet as well as share your findings with others. The “digital carry-on” would then store all of your downloaded content so that you can review it later during a wifi-enabled flight (on any airline) or where ever you would have access to the internet.

Basically it gave you the ability to create bookmarks to content that you could refer to at a later date and have all of them consolidated in one location. As part of the program Lufthansa would also make content recommendations to CloudStream users.

Lufthansa’s Social Media Team has just launched their next contest via Facebook. Called “Sports Bingo”, the contest is geared around the London Olympic Games and is based on a “Bingo” format.

The prizes are outstanding for this promotion. Lufthansa will be giving away 3 sets of tickets to Rio De Janeiro (each set contains 2 tickets), Hotel Vouchers from “Worldhotels” and 10,000 Lufthansa Flight vouchers.

You must use your Facebook account to enter. The format is similar to the “Euro Cup 2012″ Fussball contest that had been run during the tournament.

To register for the contest and begin collecting you Bingo “Markers”, please visit the contest’s Facebook Page. Registration is open from July 25 to August 12, 2012.

Participation is limited to citizens of the following countries (Sorry US, we’re excluded again):

Albania, Argentina, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Hungary, Hongkong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Irish Republic, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Moldova, Morocco, Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Venezuela, Vietnam.

Good luck to everyone and let me know if you win something along the way!

Recently, Lufthansa’s Social Media Team in Frankfurt introduced Blue Legends. This App was built upon Foursquare technology which allows those of us flying on Lufthansa to “Check In” along our travels and earn Badges, Trophies, Mayorships and other accolades.

Blue Legends has been in place since June 28 and has been a great success thus far. I have heard back from many readers who are enjoying the new App and are looking forward to more from Blue Legends.

To this end, the Lufthansa Social Media team will be meeting in the near future to review all of the feedback that has been provided to them, as well as to discuss future expansion of Blue Legends. They have asked me to reach out to my readers who are familiar with Blue Legends to seek their feedback and ideas.

If you have used Blue Legends and have constructive feedback and ideas on what you would like to see from Blue Legends going forward, please send me an email to Lufthansa Flyer or leave your comments as a reply to this post.

For your efforts, I will be giving away a “Lufthansa Fan Pack” to one lucky winner chosen at random. Thanks!