Lufthansa Group (LHG) has never been the model of efficiency, which is rather shocking since that’s exactly what you’d expect from a Germany company. But you need to look no further than the number of different subsidiary airlines — at least partial owners of Lufthansa, SWISS, Austrian, Brussels, ITA, Discover, Eurowings, Edelweiss, Lufthansa CityLine, Lufthansa City Airlines, Air Dolomiti, and SunExpress plus probably a few others that were started in the last 10 minutes — to realize that there is work to be done. At the company’s recent Capital Markets Day, it promised to do just that… again.
The more than 100-page presentation read like a primer on everything wrong with LHG and exactly how it would be fixed. Consultants clearly made good money putting together a “Value creation” plan with four pillars. Two of those involve Lufthansa Cargo and Lufthansa Technik, so I won’t address them. But on the airline side, the goal is to go “from a group of airlines to ONE Airline Group.” In case you were wondering, this will be a “Streamlined and synergetic oprating model.” Good job, consultants.
In this plan,SWISS, Austrian, Brussels and Eurowings will have an “efficiency program” while Lufthansa itself will have a “turnaround.” And all of the airlines in the group will participate in a fleet modernization. That’s going to increase profit by 2.5 billion euros by 2028. Sure it will.
I didn’t realize Lufthansa itself was such a mess that it needed a turnaround, but there is plenty of data here showing an operational problem alongside other issues. But overall, the main goal seems to be to take away more of the independence each airline has and make them as similar as possible without breaking them completely. That means things like having a more consistent hard product on board with the new Lufthansa Allegris and SWISS Senses business class seats as their prime example. Forget that these experiences are actually very complex with a whole number of different seat types with varying costs. At least the whole fleet will eventually have that same level of complexity.
And then there’s the fleet discussion. On the narrowbody side, LHG has been relatively centered around the A320ceo and now neo families. But SWISS and ITA both fly the A220 while both Austrian and Air Dolomiti use the E190/195 and Lufthansa Cityline flies the CRJ-900. But those are minor fleets. Don’t worry, however. Because LHG has now bought 40 B737-8 MAX aircraft to go to Eurowings, and it looks like some of those will have actually domestic First Class-style seating for medium-haul flying unlike the full-service airlines in the group which have Eurobusiness with a blocked middle. That’s… a strategy, I suppose.
Despite that new complexity, it’s the widebody side that needs to be consolidated even more. Here is how things look today, according to Airfleets.
Lufthansa Group Widebody Fleet Counts by Airline
Data via Airfleets
This company is all over the map. And now, it will try to make some progress… but not much, actually. The B767s at Austrian will be gone next year and the A340s at Lufthansa, SWISS, and Edelweiss are out in 2027. (Can we just take a moment to think about the fact that it still flies that many A340s?) Other than that, the A330-200s will go away but the -300s will remain. The 777-200s will disappear, but there will still be B777-300ERs. And the B747-400s will retire, but the -8s stick around.
In their place? Well, Lufthansa Group has more B787-9s and A350-900s coming in to complement the existing fleet. ITA, however, already has an order for some A330-900neos to join the fleet, and that’s not changing. Then LHG will also take 15 A350-1000s alongside the slightly larger B777-9 which is also pretty similar in size to the B747-8. And then there’s the A380. What will happen to that, I have no idea. Apparently LHG has no idea either. It just has a big question mark next to the fleet type. I’m not kidding:
This apparently counts as a fleet simplication. Only at Lufthansa Group would that be possible.
In the end, Lufthansa is really trying to make an airline group that travelers want to fly… specfically an airline group that old-man Jake Gyllenhaal wants to fly.
Or at least, it’ll be a group he wants to fly in 2030 when 95 percent of the fleet will have the already long-delayed new business class product onboard.
This company has always felt challenging to fix, and this presentation makes me feel only slightly better about that. There is a long way to go before LHG can compete with the efficiency of an IAG which long ago centralized core functions. Even Air France-KLM is slowly catching up, but it just has fewer airlines brands to try and synthesize anyway.
In the meantime, I assume that LHG will just continue to push out turnaround plans concocted by consultants. It seems to be that as long as it looks like it’s doing something, it will keep on keeping on.
