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Lufthansa to add 1,000 new domestic flights in light of Air Berlin insolvency

DPA/The Local
DPA/The Local - [email protected]
Lufthansa to add 1,000 new domestic flights in light of Air Berlin insolvency
A Lufthansa jumbo jet making a landing at Berlin's Tegel airport. Photo: DPA.

Germany’s biggest airline Lufthansa has announced it will add 1,000 new domestic flights per month in response to an increase in flight prices on some of the popular German routes as a result of Air Berlin’s bankruptcy.

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Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr recently announced the additional flights within Germany after noticing that flying had become more expensive on some of the in-demand routes, including Berlin-Munich and Berlin-Cologne, since Air Berlin went bankrupt.

“As soon as we get the green light from Brussels, we want to add 1,000 domestic flights in Germany per month for Eurowings alone,” Spohr told Bild newspaper on Monday.

Eurowings is a budget airline that is owned by Lufthansa.

“I can promise that new domestic flights will bring stable prices again,” Spohr added. The additional flights are intended to remedy capacity constraints as a result of the discontinuation of Air Berlin flights.

SEE ALSO: ‘For Air Berlin €1,400 is nothing, for me and my family it is a huge amount of money’

The biggest airline in Germany already has plans to take over a substantial part of its insolvent competitor’s flight operations. Lufthansa intends to snap up 81 Air Berlin jets and their take off and landing slots, at a price of €210 million.

But before this can happen, the EU competition watchdog has to approve it.

According to Spohr, each day there is a lack of 60,000 seats on flights after the Air Berlin bankruptcy.

"No airline in the world can make up for that," he said, adding that Lufthansa is doing everything it can to counteract this.

A jumbo jet for instance will be used for the one-hour Berlin-Frankfurt flight route even though it is a large, expensive aircraft and thus not economically viable, Spohr said.

“But it shows that we want to help,” the Lufthansa CEO added.

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