LUFTHANSA and Germanwings are marginally expanding their services in the forthcoming winter flight schedules. Their joint capacity in terms of available seat-kilometres will increase overall by 1.1 per cent. This growth is attributable to the deployment of larger air-craft. In combination with Germanwings, Lufthansa is offering customers an even wider choice of destinations totalling 211 in 81 countries.
Of the total, Lufthansa is serving 199 destinations on its own, while Germanwings is counting services to 64 destinations in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. In the coming winter, the duo will be welcoming passengers aboard on a weekly total of 12,162 flights. Worldwide, statistically, a flight by Lufthansa and Germanwings will be taking off on average every 50 seconds.
In total, the group of airlines (Lufthansa, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, Germanwings and Swiss) will be serving a total of 274 destinations in 106 countries on four continents besides offering numerous codeshare flights along with their own services. Week-in, week-out, the Group airlines will be carrying passengers on 19,798 flights comfortably and reliably to their destination. The new winter timetable runs until Saturday, March 29, 2014.
The two flagships in the Lufthansa long-haul fleet, Airbus A380 and the Boeing 747-8, will be deployed on further connections in the winter flight schedules. The A380 has already been flying five times a week from Frankfurt to Shanghai and Frankfurt to Mexico City route since the end of September and will commence flights from Frankfurt to Chicago when the winter timetable comes into force.
In addition, services will be increased to daily flights on connections from Frankfurt to Philadelphia on the US East Coast and to Dammam in Saudi Arabia in order to accommodate growing demand. Lufthansa will again be flying as usual non-stop in winter from Munich to Cape Town.
Lufthansa will be flying fans and competitors nonstop to the Black Sea on a special connection set up for the 2014 Winter Olympics and Paralympics. This connection will be operated from January 24 to March 17 by an Airbus A321. Winter sports enthusiasts will be able to fly comfortably and nonstop to the Olympic arenas and skiing events up to five times weekly.
According to present plans, flights to 23 of the previous destinations previously served by Lufthansa out of Hamburg and Berlin will be flown in winter by Germanwings. In the coming months, the following routes from Hamburg will be taken over by Germanwings: Amsterdam, Birmingham, Budapest, Geneva, London, Madrid, Milan, Manchester, Oslo, Paris, Stockholm and Zurich.
The transfer of flights from Hamburg will be completed by the end of the winter flight schedules at the end of March 2014. Passengers on flights from Berlin will be able to fly with Germanwings in winter to Birmingham, Bologna, Bucharest, Geneva, Helsinki, London, Málaga, Nuremberg, Rome, Milan and Vienna. The transfer of all direct services will be completed in the course of summer 2014. Lufthansa’s direct flights from Dusseldorf will be taken over by Germanwings, as planned, in the summer timetable 2014.
Lufthansa is making travel planning even easier for its customers. As a first in the industry, the airline is offering passengers a new online planning tool – the “Journey Planner” – for them to detail their route easily from door to door, including the use of diverse transport options.