In a press conference on Monday at the Frankfurt Headquarters, Lufthansa Group CEO Carsten Spohr has announced that beginning in August, a dedicated airline on a new AOC and with newly negotiated contracts for the crews will be established for every single flight in the group’s network. “We have successfully tested this process years ago by transferring mainline flights to CityLine, creating Project Ocean and branding it Eurowings Discover to take over long haul routes, splitting Eurowings into Classic and Eurowings Europe and establishing City Airlines earlier this year.”
Spohr added that the group has a long history of branding certain aircraft and flights as “Fanhansa”, “5StarHansa”, “LoveHansa” or “SiegerFlieger”, which customers perceived as fun marketing gimmicks, not realizing that these were actually separate legal entities with their own operator certificate and crew contracts, allowing for ever decreasing labor cost and many other legal and tax benefits.
On Monday’s press conference, Spohr announced that the group was about to announce the creation of CityHansa for flights from Hamburg, SunriseCity for morning flights into Vienna, and 0ceanFlyer for “flights across oceans”, with a zero digit replacing the capital O to make it harder for passengers to fill out forms to claim compensation, when they decided to go all in and create a new separate airline for each and every flight in their network.
Later that afternoon, flight schedules and the booking engine already reflected the recent changes, showing flights operated by “CityOcean”, “LoveFlieger”, “HansaCity”, “SpohrHansa”, “CityLine_2”, “CityLine_5”, “Untitled_1”, “$new_airline” or “E7§T5f(“.
“Our guests will not notice the difference”, Spohr added. “The branding and in-flight experience will remain the same, these are just some background changes that allow us to pay our pilots and cabin crew practically nothing.”
At press time, your compensation claim was denied due to incorrectly specified operating carrier.
2023-06-15