The Lufthansa Group Miles & More debit card has launched: here's what UK travellers get
- Helena
- 3 minutes ago
- 10 min read
Currensea and the Lufthansa Group have launched the Miles & More debit card for UK travellers today. This is the fourth co-branded card from Currensea after Hilton, Marriott and United.
We've had an early look ahead of launch, and here's everything the Lufthansa Group Miles & More debit card (catchy name) includes.
Quick facts: Lufthansa Group Miles & More debit card at a glance
Detail | Summary |
Annual fee | £180 (free for Senator in year one, free every year for HON Circle) |
Welcome bonus | 10,000 miles after £2,000 foreign currency spend in 12 months |
Launch bonus | Extra 5,000 miles for the first 500 cardholders |
Anniversary bonus | 5,000 miles on renewal after £15,000 spend in the prior 12 months |
UK earn rate | 1 mile per £1, reducing to 0.5 miles per £1 from 2nd September 2027. |
Foreign currency earn rate | 1 mile per £1 |
Lufthansa Group earn rate | 2 miles per £1 |
FX fee | 0.99% on card spend and ATM withdrawals (2.5% over £250 at ATMs) |
Credit check required? | No, it's a debit card linked to your existing UK bank account |
If that's enough for you, you can read more and apply for the Lufthansa Group Miles & More debit card here. For everyone else, Miles & More is the loyalty programme of:
Lufthansa
Brussels Airlines
Swiss
Austrian
ITA
LOT
Luxair
Air Dolomiti
Croatia Airlines
Discover Airlines
Eurowings
Miles & More also opens the door to the Star Alliance network, just like the United debit card, and for a lot of UK-based travellers, that will likely be the better use of these miles.
It's also worth being clear that this card is a debit card, not a credit card. There's no interest to worry about because you're not borrowing anything, you're spending your own money from your own UK bank account. There's no credit check as part of the application, and it won't show up on your credit file. So if you've been put off applying for an airline credit card before, this could be more up your street.
What does the Lufthansa Group Miles & More debit card include?
The annual fee
The card costs £180 a year, but there are two ways the annual fee can be waived entirely, and they're both tied to your existing Miles & More status if you have it:
Miles & More tier | What you get |
Senator | First year free |
HON Circle | Every year free |
The fee is refunded rather than waived up front: you pay the £180 first, and your Miles & More status is checked afterwards. The fee will be refunded to you in around 10 working days due to direct debit processing times.
If you're starting from zero with Lufthansa, you'll pay the full £180 in year one regardless, so the waiver is a loyalty reward rather than a way in for new members. This card has clearly been designed to reward loyalty, so if you're already a Senator or HON Circle member, it's almost a no-brainer to get this card.
Welcome bonus
You'll earn 10,000 miles once you've spent £2,000 in foreign currency within your first 12 months.
As you will have noticed, the catch is that this has to be spent in foreign currency, so UK spending alone won't get you there. If you've got a trip abroad coming up, or you shop with overseas retailers reasonably often, this is achievable without much effort.
There's also a limited-time offer running for early adopters. The first 500 cardholders to apply will get an extra 5,000 miles just for making their first transaction. Unsure if you're one of the first 500? If during the application it says you are one of the first 500, then you'll receive the bonus miles. If not, sorry.
Anniversary bonus
Spend £15,000 in the 12 months before your renewal date and you'll get 5,000 bonus miles when the card renews.
£15,000 a year is a real commitment. It's the same amount needed to trigger a Companion Voucher on the two British Airways American Express cards, but if you're booking multiple business class flights a year on the Lufthansa Group, this could be an easy task.
Earn rates
Spend type | Earn rate |
GBP spend | 1 mile per £1 |
Foreign currency spend | 1 mile per £1 |
Lufthansa Group spend | 2 miles per £1 |
At 1 mile per £1 on UK spend, this is a stronger everyday earner than the United debit card, which manages just 0.67 miles per £1 in the same category. If you're choosing between the two purely on domestic earning power, this card wins comfortably.
This rate is going to change as of 12:00pm BST on 2 September 2027, going down to 0.5 miles per £1. That's roughly a year, which gives you a reasonable window to make the most of the current rate.
Foreign currency spend holds steady at 1 mile per £1, and Lufthansa Group spend earns double at 2 miles per £1. These look likely to stay the same rate.
On foreign exchange, card spend abroad comes with the real-time exchange rate plus a 0.99% FX fee, in line with the Hilton and United cards from Currensea, and considerably better than the 2.99% many standard UK bank cards still charge.
ATM withdrawals carry the same 0.99% fee, but there's a catch worth knowing about: a 2.5% fee applies on any single withdrawal over £250. If you're planning to use this as your main source of cash abroad, it's worth keeping withdrawals under that threshold where you can.
Extras included
Beyond the miles, there's a useful set of extras bundled in:
Perk | Detail |
Mileage exchange | Convert up to 25,000 miles into status progress |
Lounge access | One free Lufthansa Business Lounge voucher per year, which can be gifted |
Priority check-in | Access to the Lufthansa Business Class Desk at Heathrow |
Mile expiry | Cardholder miles never expire |
One time 15% discount | |
eSIMs | 6 x 1GB eSIMs annually |
All of these are nice-to-haves, but personally I think the stand out feature in that table is the ability to transfer miles into status progress. More on that later.
What makes the first four perks in the above table worth shouting about is that this combination doesn't exist anywhere else in the UK card market. Converting spend into airline status progress, not just miles, is rare enough on its own, and it says something about where loyalty programmes are heading (Sam wrote about this recently).
They've added in a lounge voucher you can gift to someone else, rather than one locked to you alone. Whilst that might seem like a small thing, it's also a rejection of how loyalty usually works: hoard your own perks, guard your own tier. Then miles that never expire, plus priority check-in. Although, I do have a slight issue with it just being Heathrow where you can access this perk and not across an entire airline group's UK network, but this is most likely down to practicalities regarding check-in staff.
Just a note on the "miles never expire", it's important to highlight that in the terms and conditions it states "provided the card has been held for at least three months, and at least one eligible transaction is made each month". So it's not enough to simply hold the card, you are going to be needing to use it to
Why should UK travellers care about Lufthansa Miles & More?
If you're a regular Points Well Made reader, there's a good chance you're sitting on Avios, Virgin Points, or both. So the obvious question is why you'd want a third loyalty currency in the mix at all.
The short answer is Star Alliance. BA and Virgin both sit in different alliances, oneworld and SkyTeam respectively, which means neither gives you natural access to the Star Alliance network. Star Alliance is the largest airline alliance in the world, and it includes Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian, Singapore Airlines, ANA, Turkish Airlines, Air Canada, TAP Air Portugal, Thai Airways and around 20 others. If any of those airlines' premium cabins are on your list, and, for a lot of people, ANA's first class or Singapore Airlines' Suites are firmly on that list, you will want miles from a Star Alliance programme to book them.
Miles & More is one of the more established ways into that network, and in some respects it's a friendlier entry point than United for a UK-based traveller. Where the United debit card earns UK spend at a fairly slow 0.67 miles per £1, this card earns at 1 mile per £1 for the next year, which means you'll build a usable balance considerably faster from everyday spending.
Miles & More has also historically had a reputation among points collectors for strong value on Lufthansa Group's own premium cabins, and 2025 saw both Lufthansa's new Allegris cabin, including its long-haul First Class, and Swiss's new Senses First open up for redemptions.
It's worth being upfront about one change in the programme too. In June 2025, Miles & More moved Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian and Lufthansa CityLine flights over to dynamic award pricing, meaning the miles required for these airlines' own flights now move with the cash price, rather than sitting on a fixed chart. I personally detest dynamic pricing when it comes to reward flight redemptions.
None of this makes Miles & More a bad programme, but it does mean the era of finding a fixed, dependable number of miles for every Lufthansa Group flight has passed, and a bit of flexibility with dates goes a long way.
Partner airline redemptions, including all of the Star Alliance names above, still sit on a fixed award chart, though that chart was also revised in 2025, with the most recent iteration published 3rd March 2026. Below is the reward chart; all figures quoted are for a return trip.
I just want to highlight some great options right here, and they all start from Europe.
First up, Europe to North America in Business for 125,000 miles return is very good.. As is my second route, return Europe to Southern Africa, also at 125,000 miles. 75,000 return for the Middle East is also really quite good. My final "top pick" as it were, would have to be 215,000 return from Europe to Australia/New Zealand.
What is the exchange rate from points to status?
The perk that got me most interested when I saw it is the ability to convert up to 25,000 miles into status progress through Miles & More's mileage exchange.
The exchange is open once per calendar year for this card, using miles earned from card purchases in the current or previous year. Welcome Bonus and promotional miles don't count, which I think is quite an important thing to highlight, and a bit of a shame if I am being honest.
Exchanges run in fixed packages:
Miles exchanged | Points | Qualifying Points |
5,000 | 20 | 20 |
10,000 | 40 | 40 |
15,000 | 60 | 60 |
20,000 | 80 | 80 |
25,000 | 100 | 100 |
The exchange is final once validated, so there's no undoing it if you change your mind.
Will this get you to the next status tier on its own? No. Even the maximum 25,000-mile exchange only earns 100 Points and 100 Qualifying Points, nowhere near what's needed to reach a tier outright. I've popped a breakdown of what points you need for what status below. So, think of it as a top-up, useful for tipping you over the line when you're just short, not a way to make a real dent in the points required for status.
Layering a mileage exchange option on top of a debit card means your everyday spending, the coffee, the supermarket shop, the online subscriptions, can now also chip away at your progress towards status, not just your mileage balance for flights.
Who is the Lufthansa Group Miles & More debit card for?
It's time to stop thinking about UK card loyalty as a two-horse race between BA and Virgin.
Yes, that is how it's worked for years, largely because they were the only real UK friendly options worth having. That's no longer true.
With Hilton, Marriott, United, IHG (with Revolut), and now Lufthansa all offering their own debit cards, UK travellers have a choice of ecosystems, and Star Alliance access through cards like this one is a big part of that shift. For some readers, this card could replace a BA Amex outright, particularly if you rarely find yourself needing Avios' short-haul network or a companion voucher, and you fly east more than you fly to the US.
For most of us though, it won't be a replacement, it'll be a complement. You keep an Amex for the routes and redemptions it does best, and you add this one in for the routes it doesn't touch or those bucket list redemption moments.
Where we think this card earns its place in your wallet:
Traveller type | Why it fits |
Frequent Lufthansa Group flyers | Double earn rate on Lufthansa spend, plus a free lounge voucher and priority check-in at Heathrow. Also, transfer miles to status. |
If you want to collect miles that can be used on Star Alliance | A direct route into ANA, Singapore Airlines, and Thai Airways redemptions. |
Existing Senator or HON Circle members | The annual fee is effectively waived, making this a free addition to your wallet |
Big spenders who can hit £15,000 a year easily | The anniversary bonus and the strong 1 mile per £1 rate (while it lasts) make this a competitive everyday card. |
Anyone who doesn't want a credit card | No credit check, no interest, no impact on your credit file. You're spending your own money and earning miles for it, which suits anyone rebuilding credit, self-employed, or simply not interested in taking on a credit product. |
You want to earn airline miles on FX spend | If this is something you are interested in then the 10,000 mile bonus once you've spent £2,000 is a good benefit. |
This is, fundamentally, a low-friction way to earn useful travel rewards without any of the commitment or stress that comes with a credit card application. You link to your already existing current account, you spend as normal, and the miles accumulate in the background. For a lot of people that simplicity is the real appeal, regardless of how many miles you end up earning.
Overall, we'd call this the strongest everyday earner among the Currensea airline cards we've looked at so far, and one of the more interesting routes for Brits looking to get access to some of the world's best business and first class products, if that's where your travel wish list is heading.
Frequently asked questions
Does the Lufthansa Group Miles & More debit card require a credit check? No. It's a debit card linked to your existing UK bank account, so there's no credit check and no impact on your credit file.
How much does the Lufthansa Group Miles & More debit card cost? £180 a year, waived for the first year for Miles & More Senator members and every year for HON Circle members.
What's the welcome bonus on the Lufthansa Group Miles & More debit card? 10,000 miles after spending £2,000 in foreign currency within the first 12 months, plus an extra 5,000 miles for the first 500 cardholders on their first transaction.
Is the Lufthansa Group Miles & More debit card better than the United debit card for UK spend? On UK spending, yes. It earns 1 mile per £1 compared to the United card's 0.67 miles per £1, though that rate could drop to 0.5 miles per £1 from October 2027.
Do Lufthansa Miles & More miles expire? No, cardholder miles never expire.
Helena
Points Well Made is a passion project from Sam and Helena. If you've enjoyed this and want to help us keep the lights on, please consider buying us a Ko-fi or subscribing monthly. You can also find us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok for more of the same. Thanks for reading.
Comments