News
Hong Kong plays a “crucial role” in Lufthansa Group Asia-Pacific growth
April 28th 2017
“Hong Kong always has and will continue to play a crucial role in Lufthansa Group’s Asia-Pacific growth,” Lufthansa Group’s newly-appointed senior sales director for Greater China, Veli Polat, told Orient Aviation. Read More »
The Lufthansa Group now operates four flights a day into Hong Kong International Airport: a Lufthansa A380 to Frankfurt, an A340-600 to Munich (to be replaced with the A350-900 from October, depending on how quickly more XWBs can be delivered), a SWISS B777-300ER to Zurich and an Austrian Airlines B777-200ER to Vienna.
In particular, Polat stressed the growing importance of Hong Kong as a transit hub for the Lufthansa Group, following the tie-up with Hong Kong flag carrier Cathay Pacific Airways that took effect on Wednesday.
Under the surprise extra-alliance deal, oneworld member Cathay places its ‘CX’ code on ten Lufthansa routes from Frankfurt, including Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Dresden, Hannover, Hamburg, Munich, Nuremberg, Oslo and Stuttgart. Cathay will also add its designator to SWISS flights from Zurich to Berlin, Brussels, Florence, Geneva, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Venice, as well as Austrian Airlines flights between Frankfurt, Zurich, Düsseldorf and the airline’s Vienna hub.
In exchange, the Lufthansa Group, an anchor of Star Alliance, will place its airlines’ codes on services operated by Cathay between Hong Kong and Auckland, as well as between Hong Kong and Cairns, Melbourne and Sydney.
The partnership will include reciprocal frequent flyer benefits accrual but it falls short of redemptions and earning on routes not covered under this week’s agreement.
Asked about how Lufthansa’s joint venture partners Air China, All Nippon Airways and Singapore Airlines felt about this extra-alliance affair between Lufthansa and Cathay, Polat said they put up fairly little resistance after having been briefed in detail as contract negotiations were still under way.
“The world is getting smaller. In a partnership like this you have to be open and walk into meetings with as much transparency as possible,” Polat said, adding “small competition” was normal and something one just “has to accept and make the best out of it”.
“As a sales person, I’d like to have more products like that on the shelves; they make my life easier,” the German-Turkish sales chief said.
And his bosses are listening. The Lufthansa-Cathay tie-up was the third surprise announcement from Lufthansa this year. In February, the Europeans and Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Aviation Group signed a comprehensive “commercial partnership agreement” covering maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO), catering and codesharing. Lufthansa and Etihad said the partnership was critical to competing effectively in today’s “complex and highly competitive global market”. And, if the rumours are true, Etihad Airways could join the Star network before year-end. On March 16, Lufthansa signed a codeshare agreement with Kazakhstan flag carrier Air Astana, which began March 26.
The Lufthansa Group just keeps growing. The group’s airlines operate more than 2,800 flights a day and its technicians at Lufthansa Technik perform more than 1,700 daily aircraft checks worldwide. Despite the massive network, the group ended 2016 with an average passenger load factor of 80.4%.
Polat told Orient Aviation the Lufthansa Group now has more than 540 subsidiaries and equity partners worldwide, including more than 100 in the Greater China region. The group is investing more than half a billion Euros (more than US$550 million) by 2020 to create more individualised products and services to improve the customer experience. Projects launched include Flynet, virtual reality, the tie-up with the Airbus-Routehappy alliance, Rimowa e-tag and Mildred, the Lufthansa Group chatbot that assist prospective passengers with their online reservations through Facebook.
