Dive Brief:
- Lufthansa Group will invest 4.5 billion euros ($4.9 billion) to benefit customer experience in 2024, the airline announced last week.
- The investments will go to new aircrafts, new seats, improved culinary and digital offerings, and lounges to improve customer satisfaction, according to Lufthansa.
- “Our declared goal for 2024 is to consistently live up to our premium standards again in terms of operational, stability and punctuality but also in terms of product and service quality,” Carsten Spohr, CEO of Lufthansa, said during a Q4 2023 earnings call last week. “A particular focus here is on the continuous expansion of digital options for our guests and better customer communication.”
Dive Insight:
With its record profits last quarter, Lufthansa promised to reinvest in customer experience. But its goals are likely to be disrupted as the airline’s cabin crew has called for a renewed two-day strike in Frankfurt and Munich.
The Independent Flight Attendants Organization, which is leading this week’s strikes, is calling for a 15% pay increase and inflation compensation for its members — 18,000 of whom are Lufthansa flight attendants and about 1,000 of whom are staff at subsidiary Cityline, according to the BBC. Over 100,000 passengers are expected to be affected by the strikes that began Tuesday and will continue through Wednesday.
Lufthansa ground staff in Germany also went on strike last week, calling for a 12.5% pay increase. The strike affected more than 200,000 travelers.
“Every strike disappoints hundreds of thousands of our guests, whom we won and need to win in the face of international competition,” Sophr said on the earnings call, which was held the same day the airline’s ground staff were striking.
The lead negotiator of the Independent Flight Attendants Organization put the blame squarely on the airline. "After 15 rounds of talks without an agreement, we must assume that management wants the situation to worsen, at passengers' expense," he said, according to Agence France Presse.
Lufthansa’s profits rose to nearly 1.7 billion euros and revenue increased 15% to 35.4 billion euros in 2023.
