Lufthansa Group is canceling a total of 20,000 flights through October following the closure of its subsidiary Cityline. Since Monday and continuing until the end of May, 120 connections per day are being eliminated, the airline announced Tuesday evening. The company plans to announce how the "flight schedule optimization" will look from June onwards by the end of April.
With the cancellation of the 20,000 flights in total, Lufthansa expects to save more than 40,000 tons of jet fuel, whose price has doubled since the beginning of the Iran war.
Lufthansa had surprisingly announced the immediate shutdown of Cityline last week. The connections from Frankfurt am Main to Bydgoszcz and Rzeszow in Poland, as well as to Stavanger in Norway, are being eliminated "at least temporarily."
Ten connections are being rerouted through different hubs than previously, affecting flights to Heringsdorf, Cork, Gdansk, Ljubljana, Rijeka, Sibiu, Stuttgart, Trondheim, Tivat, and Wroclaw. Lufthansa operates six hubs - in addition to Frankfurt and Munich, these include Vienna, Zurich, Brussels, and Rome.
The airline assured passengers that they will continue to have "access to the worldwide route network."
The airline is eliminating "unprofitable short-haul flights" from its network. Across the entire group - which includes Swiss, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, and ITA Airways in addition to Lufthansa - the supply of seat kilometers is being reduced by just under one percent.
The airline emphasized that it expects a "stable fuel supply" for the flights scheduled in the summer timetable. To this end, Lufthansa is working "on different measures, for example for the physical supply of jet fuel as well as for price hedging."
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