Two years of loyalty, 80k CHF spent, and I can't book my family holiday on Swiss. Anyone else?
I need to get this off my chest because I am genuinely furious and I want to know if anyone else has been through this.
Two years ago I signed up to the iCorner Miles & More credit card. The pitch was simple: spend on the card, earn miles, redeem those miles on Swiss International Air Lines. I live in Switzerland. I fly Swiss. It made complete sense.
So for two years I made a deliberate choice. Every time I could have booked a cheaper low-cost flight, I didn't. I paid the premium. I flew Swiss. I stayed loyal to this programme specifically because I was told I could eventually use those miles to fly my family somewhere meaningful. I built up miles on roughly 80,000 CHF of card spend. That is not a small number. That is two years of deliberate, conscious loyalty.
Fast forward to last week. I try to book Geneva to Tokyo for Easter 2027. Two adults, two kids (they'll be 2 and 4 years old). The booking window literally just opened two weeks ago, so I'm early. I'm organised. I'm excited.
I open the Miles & More app.
No Swiss flights. Zero. The only options are Lufthansa via Frankfurt or Munich, including one on a Boeing 747 that is approximately 20 years old. I live in Switzerland. I do not want to travel to Germany to catch a connection on an ageing aircraft through a hub that has seen repeated strike action and cancellations in recent years. And more importantly, that is not what I signed up for.
Here is the part that made my blood boil. Swiss has flights available on swiss.com for cash on those exact dates. I can see them. I can buy them right now. But the Miles & More platform shows me nothing. It's as if Swiss flights simply do not exist in their system.
So I call customer service. 23 minutes on the phone. The agent tells me that all Swiss award seats are already taken. All of them. For a flight in March 2027 that only opened for booking two weeks ago. I pushed back. She then told me that her system did not show any flights from Zurich to Tokyo on those dates at all. Not Lufthansa, not Swiss, nothing. That is factually impossible. Swiss and Lufthansa fly this route daily. I was being told by a customer service representative that flights that exist do not exist.
We tried adjusting the dates. Same result. No Swiss, only Lufthansa. We tried changing the destination to Singapore, thinking maybe I book Geneva/Zurich to Singapore on Swiss and sort Tokyo myself. Same result. No Swiss flights. Only Lufthansa. Not on my dates, not on any variation she tried.
At no point in two years of marketing, sign-up materials or card communications was it made clear to me that "redeem on Swiss" effectively means "you get Lufthansa instead, on a routing you didn't ask for, through a country you don't live in." That is not what I agreed to.
I have since sent a formal complaint to Miles & More citing Swiss consumer protection law. I have also contacted the Managing Director of Miles & More directly, because his own LinkedIn profile describes him as a leader committed to "customer-centric ecosystems" and I felt he should be aware of what that ecosystem actually looks like from the inside.
But before I go further down the legal route I genuinely want to know: has anyone else experienced this? Is this a known issue with Miles & More? Is the Swiss award inventory just effectively nonexistent and we are all being sold a product that doesn't deliver? Is there a way to actually get Swiss-operated award flights out of this programme or is it structurally impossible?
And honestly, is this a scam? Because from where I'm standing, it looks like one. You get people like me to spend significant money on a co-branded card by promising access to an airline we actually want to fly, and then when we try to redeem, that airline's inventory is nowhere to be found. The cash seats are right there on swiss.com. The award seats are invisible.
I sacrificed cost for loyalty for two years. I want to know if anyone else has been through this and what, if anything, they did about it. So mad.