Expanding capacity in winter schedule

The airlines in the Lufthansa Group – Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, Germanwings, Lufthansa and SWISS – are again offering customers a dense and high-frequency route network in the upcoming winter flight timetable, with 18,900 flights a week. This winter, the Acme group will link 260 destinations in 100 countries on four continents via its hubs in Frankfurt, Munich, Zurich, Vienna and Brussels, but also with many point-to-point connections.

Around 20,500 weekly codeshare flights with other partner airlines extend the carriers’ respective programmes and enable single-source bookings. The winter flight timetables for the individual Group airlines apply from October 26 to March 28.

Thanks to the use of larger aircraft, the Group’s capacity in available seat-kilometres is increasing by 2.9% compared with the same period last year. At the same time, the number of flights in the period of the timetable is going down by 2.9%. On average, a Lufthansa Group aircraft is taking off somewhere around the world every 32 seconds. The individual route networks of the Group airlines are increasingly converging with one another. Almost all destinations are connected via a Lufthansa Group hub. End-to-end fares enable passengers to book multiple journeys with convenient and punctual connecting flights. Fourty-nine per cent of the nearly 105 million passengers a year now book a transfer connection via a Lufthansa hub. Nineteen European airports are served by all five airlines in the Lufthansa Group.

Lufthansa

After a break of over 15 years, Lufthansa is resuming flights to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands this winter. From October 26, the new connection will take off from Munich to Gran Canaria every Sunday, and every Saturday during school holidays. Also new in the winter months are flights from Munich to Split (Croatia) and Valencia (Spain). As of October 2, Lufthansa also flies from Frankfurt to the Marrakesh.

A further addition to the flight plan from Munich is Miami, which will now have a daily non-stop connection. Delhi will also get a daily service from Frankfurt with the Airbus A380. The Frankfurt-Luanda will be strengthened by a third weekly flight.

SWISS

As well as seasonal reductions of some flights, SWISS is increasing its capacity to popular holiday destinations. The route between Zurich and Miami is to receive four extra SWISS flights a week, taking the total to fourteen weekly connections. Services to São Paolo will also be increased by three flights a week this winter, taking the total to 10 weekly connections. The flight timetable will also include a daily connection to Los Angeles again. In Geneva, SWISS is continuing many destinations from its summer flight timetable throughout the winter, including Copenhagen, Rome, Lisbon and Pristina.

Austrian Airlines

Austrian Airlines is again offering its passengers a wide range of up to 100 destinations in 56 countries around the world. Following the introduction of Newark last July, Austrian Airlines will increase its weekly capacity from five flights to six flights a week as of April, and to one flight a day in June. Austrian will therefore be flying daily to all its North American destinations. As a result of high demand in transit traffic, Austrian Airlines is also increasing the frequency of its flights to and from Chişinău from seven a week to a maximum of 10 a week in the future.

Brussels Airlines

Brussels Airlines is adding Riga to its winter flight timetable and improving many connections by adding additional flights.

Brussels Airlines is boosting its capacity with additional flights from Brussels to Tel Aviv, Madrid, Marrakesh, Budapest, Geneva, Vilnius, Hanover and Bologna. Connections are also being improved to the African destinations of Douala, Yaoundé, Nairobi, Kigali, Bujumbura and Luanda.

Germanwings

Germanwings is offering 84 destinations from Berlin-Tegel, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Cologne/Bonn and Stuttgart. Additional capacity will still focus on Düsseldorf, where Germanwings is taking over more routes from Lufthansa. There are new high-frequency connections to Berlin (57 flights a week), London-Heathrow (33 flights a week) and Zurich (24 flights a week). Also new from Düsseldorf are flights to Málaga (two flights a week), Naples (three flights a week), Nice (two flights a week), Moscow (seven flights a week) and Rome (five flights a week). The transfer of Lufthansa routes to Germanwings will be completed on Jan. 8 with Düsseldorf – Zurich. Germanwings is also introducing Düsseldorf – Istanbul, with two weekly flights. Its programme in the German capital is also being extended with the takeover of two Lufthansa flights a week between Berlin-Tegel and Tel Aviv. With one flight a week, the German airline is also launching a new connection from Cologne/Bonn to Larnaca.