German air transport giant Lufthansa announced on Thursday that it would cancel around 900 flights in July as staff shortages affect the entire European air transport sector.
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Lufthansa welcomed the rebound in bookings with the lifting of most anti-COVID-19 restrictions in Europe, admitting in a statement it was unable to meet that demand.
“The infrastructure has not yet fully recovered” from “the most serious crisis in aviation”, the corona pandemic, explains Lufthansa.
In view of “bottlenecks and staff shortages” from which “the entire aviation industry, especially in Europe” is suffering, the group decided in July to cancel 900 German and European flights planned for Fridays and weekends with start and finish at the “hubs”. Frankfurt and Munich.
This corresponds to 5% of the seats that can normally be reserved at weekends.
The low-cost subsidiary Eurowings also announced in the same press release that it had been forced to cut “several hundred flights” in July.
Lufthansa is not the first European group to give up flights due to a lack of staff. In May, the Dutch company KLM canceled dozens of flights.
“The immediate challenge is to manage the sudden increase in traffic as the pandemic has enormously reduced airport and ground handling resources,” Olivier Jankovec, general manager of ACI Europe, told the Association of European Airports in early May.
There is a shortage of staff at airports, air traffic control and airlines. But the sector is struggling to recruit while the labor market is “very tight across Europe”, according to Mr. Jankovec.
In two years of health crisis and restrictions, Lufthansa has suffered abysmal losses and cut more than 30,000 jobs.
People who have already booked flights will be notified of cancellations and have their reservations changed, Lufthansa said.
To avoid airport congestion, the company recommends its passengers to arrive early, check in online and keep hand luggage to a minimum.
In May, Lufthansa was pleased to see the number of bookings continue to rise and was expecting a “record summer” from a tourism point of view.
Driven by a “stabilization of the health situation”, the Swiss subsidiary also repaid a loan guaranteed by Bern in advance as part of the rescue of the group, which was on the verge of bankruptcy due to the Covid 19 pandemic.