Business travel is taking off, says Lufthansa CEO amid influx of flights at City Airport
Lufthansa’s CEO says the airline is placing more flights over the next two months as demand for business travel picks up again, according to reports.
“We are now seeing very clearly that business travellers are coming back,” chief executive Carsten Spohr told Reuters, who first reported the news, at a conference in Berlin.
Spohr said in Europe the airline was “already flying 60 per cent of our programme again.”
The airline, he continued, increased capacity on its domestic flights by 30 per cent during September with plans to increase it by a further 15 per cent next month.
Hourly flights between Frankfurt and Hamburg, and between Frankfurt and Berlin, will be reintroduced in the mornings and evenings, the most popular times for business travellers to fly.
Spohr also said the air cargo trade was thriving: “In air freight, due to the major unprecedented bottlenecks in global supply chains, the boom has even increased since the end of the summer holidays.”
The news follows reports last week that London City Airport has seen a higher number of flights too as both Lufthansa and British Airways restored flights to other key financial hubs.
Flights to Zurich, Frankfurt and Rotterdam were some of the flights that were resumed in September, the airport’s COO Alison FitzGerlad told Business Day, who first reported the news.
According to Bloomberg NEF data, the number of flights from London City is expected to rise by over 70 per cent during September to reach 260 flights per week by the end of the month.