Frankfurt:Â German national carrier Lufthansa will cut its winter flight plan by “around 10 per cent” as the spread of the Omicron variant fuels uncertainty about travel, chief executive Carsten Spohr said Thursday (Dec. 23).
“From the middle of January to February, we see a sharp drop off in bookings”, leading the airline group to cancel “33,000 flights of about 10 per cent” of its flights this winter, Spohr said in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS).
“Above all, we are missing passengers in our home markets of Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Belgium, because these countries have been hit hardest by the pandemic wave,” Spohr said.
Europe’s largest airline group — which includes Eurowings, Austrian, Swiss and Brussels Airlines — was currently running “about 60 per cent” of flights compared with the pre-pandemic year 2019, carrying “roughly half” the number of passengers, the CEO said.
The number of cancellations would have been higher were the group not running 18,000 “extra, unnecessary flights just to secure our landing and takeoff rights,” Spohr said.
The airline industry has been battered since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, with countless flights grounded in 2020 as countries closed their borders.
The European airports association ACI Europe estimated Thursday that the number of passengers travelling through its members had dropped 20 per cent since November 24, when the Omicron variant was first reported to the World Health Organization.
Germany has placed stricter limits on travellers coming from the United Kingdom and South Africa, among others, where the new variant has caused a surge in cases.
Lufthansa posted its first operating profit since the beginning of the pandemic in the third quarter of this year, after a difficult 18 months.
The carrier booked an underlying, or operating loss of 5.5 billion euros ($6.2 billion) in 2020 and turned to the state for support.
In November, Lufthansa announced it had finished paying back the nine-billion-euro bailout it received from the government earlier than planned.
