Lufthansa is slightly increasing its flight services this winter. Its expanded route network will encompass 194 destinations in 79 countries, compared with 188 destinations in winter 2007. Capacity will be increased by 2.4 per cent across Lufthansa’s route network in the 2008 winter timetable. Broken down the European traffic will rise by 1.9 per cent and the long-haul offer by 2.7 per cent. In total, 13,402 Lufthansa flights per week are scheduled for the winter period, compared with 13,272 last winter. That represents a year-on-year increase of 0.9 per cent.

The majority of services will be operated on short-haul routes and will comprise 12,278 flights per week to domestic German and European destinations, up from 12,208 flights per week last year. The number of long-haul flights will be increased from 1,064 to 1,124. The 2008/2009 winter timetable runs from Sunday 26 October 2008 to Saturday 28 March 2009.

"We are continuing to offer our customers an extensive range of flight services even though the market situation and the competitive environment have become much more difficult in recent months," says Karl-Ulrich Garnadt, Executive Vice President Services and Human Resources, Lufthansa Passenger Airlines. "All the all-year-round destinations that Lufthansa introduced this summer were well accepted by our customers and these have also been retained in the winter timetable. We are optimising our flight services but there will not be any massive cuts at Lufthansa during the forthcoming timetable period."

All eleven of the all-year-round destinations that were introduced in the 2008 summer timetable will continue to be served during the winter. These include the long-haul destinations Calgary, Luanda, Malabo, Nanjing, Pune, Seattle and Shenyang as well as the European destinations Billund, Bristol, Cluj and Klagenfurt.

Available capacity on long-haul routes from Dusseldorf, which was increased this year, was successfully taken up in the market. On these routes, there will be a regular seasonal change: In the winter timetable, the service to Toronto will be replaced by a new connection to Miami. From February 2009, Lufthansa is also doubling the number of direct flights offered from Milan to attractive European destinations, including Barcelona, Brussels, Budapest, Bucharest, Madrid and Paris. These new connections, which number about 150 per week, are in addition to the above-mentioned increase in capacity from 26 October.