Andreas Koster, the Lufthansa Director responsible for the Irish market, visited Dublin to brief the media on the performance of the airline’s first nine months of the year. In an interesting and informative presentation he revealed that flights to Ireland increased by 10% and passenger numbers are up by 10%.
In 2018, Lufthansa will have five flights a day from Dublin to Frankfurt, Munich will have 13 flights a week Swiss, part of the Lufthansa Group will operate 10 flights from Dublin to Zurich in summer and three to Geneva. Cork will have three weekly flights to Zurich and Shannon will have one weekly flight to Frankfurt.
The Lufthansa Group increased its total revenues for the first nine months of the year by 12.1% to €26,761 million (prior-year period: €23,870 million). Traffic revenues rose 14.4% to €21,360 million (prior-year period: €18,674 million). The key performance indicator of Adjusted EBIT increased by €883 million to €2,560 million (prior-year period: €1,677 million). As a result, the Lufthansa Group’s result for the period was a further substantial improvement on its previous record level of 2016.
The good nine-month result is attributable to continuing positive business trends at the Group’s airlines. Despite increasing overall capacity for the period by 11.7%, the Group’s air carriers improved their aggregate nine-month seat load factor by 2.1 percentage points. Unit costs excluding fuel and currency factors were reduced by 0.8% in the same period, although a slight 0.2% increase was recorded for the third quarter, mainly due to provisions for higher profit sharing payments of 1.1 percentage points.
It is interesting to note the market share of passengers to and within Europe is as follows: Ryanair 13%, Lufthansa 9%, IAG 8%, easyJet 8%, and Air France-KLM 5%, while others have 57%.
