Lufthansa Group Update
Tamur Goudarzi Pour, VP airline sales, the Americas for the Lufthansa Group provides an update on a range of topics including Lufthansa’s ambitions for Latin America, the integration of Eurowings and Lufthansa’s monitoring of narrowbody operations on the Atlantic.
Transcript
Tamur Goudarzi PourLatin America is hugely important for us and we have a number of online destinations, and organic growth really is something where we're going for, we are further developing our capacities this year. We're expanding again back in Brazil, for example, with the Swiss bringing the triple seven also back to Latin America. So we are actually expanding organically.
On top of that, we have partnerships with Copa and Avianca and multiple other interline agreements, so both on the organic front and also in inorganic growth we are seeing more potential for us and I think we are in the market, but there's more to get.
Well, we have been the biggest player on North Atlantic together with our partners Air Canada and United in the AJV, the Atlantic Joint Venture that we have. That has not really that much affected us because we have been in a very strong position, nevertheless for the catchment of Dusseldorf we have also reacted and we have also now started flights from there with Eurowings not only to the Caribbean, but also starting to the North Atlantic region and we will start in two weeks' time, a Dusseldorf-New York flight with Eurowings and also we have Miami-Dusseldorf, and Fort Meyers-Dusseldorf coming, on top of Las Vegas and also Seattle, where we are flying with Eurowings. We're actually catching up some of the business that was left behind, but anyway from a very strong position that we had already before.
Well, we are growing this year, that's important. We want to grow with the market and that means that currently Eurowings is growing quicker, because they're starting from a lower base, and we are pushing that growth from Dusseldorf and I think that's the next big step for us. Eurowings definitely is a new player and we would like to establish it fairly well here in the North Atlantic. [inaudible 00:01:57] process and it's going well. Brussels Airlines is an interesting player for us also on North Atlantic. We're flying three destinations, we're flying Toronto, we're flying Washington, and we're flying New York. We're transporting from here many passengers not only to Brussels itself, but also to Europe and particularly also to the African continent, where [inaudible 00:02:18] Africa-Brussels has a very prominent role as that's an important addition of business segment for. That's working very well and this is set to continue, also in an integration with Eurowings.
t's happening already and I think definitely there will be new players on the North Atlantic coming with more narrow body operations. And we will see how this will develop. To have [inaudible 00:02:40] doesn't mean you have a commercial model that works. We're currently, ourselves, investigating if the narrow body long range [inaudible 00:02:47] would be suitable one for us or not. You have to have a relatively western position in order to make an operation viable. We are looking at that, it's not an easy exercise and I think very much it depends on what business model is behind such an operation.
We're very proud about the acknowledgement by Sky Tracks to be the only five-star rated airline in the Western hemisphere. This is a great acknowledgement, we have worked for it for two years and we have done further improvements on a very strong service already. Lufthansa really has, here, a competitive advantage to be a premium carrier and the customer really acknowledges [inaudible 00:03:27] it.
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