The US airline wants to massively expand its European offer next summer, including to Germany.
(Photo: imago images/ZUMA Wire)
Frankfurt The US airline Delta Air Lines will expand its connections across the North Atlantic in the summer of next year. On the one hand, this means new connections to Germany and, on the other hand, the range of flights on certain routes is also expanding.
New to the program are London, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart and Geneva. The expansion is part of the largest transatlantic flight schedule, which includes nearly 620 weekly flights from 32 airports in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) to 11 US airports, Delta said on Monday.
For Lufthansa this means: Europe’s largest airline group has to adapt to more competition. CEO Carsten Spohr has high hopes for the US market. He assumes that Germany will be hit harder by a recession than many other markets in Europe. “We have made a major switch to the USA as a sales location. We sell there at prices and capacity utilization that we don’t know in this form,” Spohr said recently in Frankfurt. “This will continue in 2023.”
With Delta, Lufthansa is now facing a powerful competitor on these routes. The company is one of the major US airlines, the fleet ranks as the second largest in the world. Like Spohr, the group management has identified great potential in the connections between North America and Europe.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
“With up to 50 flights a week next summer, we’re making it more convenient for customers across the country to travel to the United States for business meetings,” said Nicolas Ferri, vice president for the EMEA region, in a statement.
China Southern is back
There is also competition coming from Asia. China Southern Airlines wants to offer flights from Germany again after the pandemic-related interruption. From October 7, Frankfurt will be connected to Guangzhou once a week, the airline announced on Tuesday.
“We are very pleased that we are finally serving Frankfurt and the German market directly again,” explained Mack Su, the airline’s sales director for Europe: “Unlike in the past, there are also no stopovers in Changsha. As a result, our passengers can now get to Guangzhou even faster and more comfortably.”
China Southern is a rival of Lufthansa on China routes. A few years ago, Spohr joined forces with the smaller Air China and founded a joint venture.
At the same time, the airline’s restart in Frankfurt could also be a sign of the slow opening of China, an important market for Lufthansa. CEO Spohr had recently not dared to predict when air traffic to China will have returned to normal. Only one thing is certain for him: “China will not be able to remain as closed as it is at the moment.”
More: Concorde successor from US company Boom lacks the necessary boost