The LH Group has been notorious for restricting premium class (especially first class space) to other Star Alliance partner airlines. I was doing a few award searches and I was definitely pleasantly surprised in finding that LX (like ANA in the past) is releasing business class space in the low season, usually February weekdays to United and Aeroplan, depending on route. This is useful because Swiss is one of the better airlines that do not have YQ with Aeroplan.

Here are some screenshots.

 

Obviously the calendar results have been filtered to show non-stop flights only. The routes that seem to have space TATL are JFK-GVA, YUL-ZRH, and MIA-ZRH (MIA-ZRH actually has very consistent space Tues/Thurs Oct-Mar). Routes like LAX, SFO, and JFK mostly have only economy, unfortunately. At least they are releasing space in advance on some routes which seems to be an improvement to their current policy of releasing space from North American gateways around a week out. I’m not sure if this is a change in policy or I’ve missed it before but I don’t think I have seen LX TATL long-haul business class space available in advance since spring of last year (excluding the Avianca Glitch of course). Europe-Asia space is fairly decent. Unfortunately, there’s no first class space yet, but we can hope. 🙂

If you have travel plans in mind for February next year it looks like a good option to take advantage of. Here is a trip report of Swiss Business Class.