Austrian Airlines and the merged regional airline Tyrolean Airways were once omnipresent at the Austrian state airports and offered numerous non-stop and direct flights. Since the beginning of the 2000s, their presence has been gradually reduced, before it was announced a few years ago that the stations would be closed and the decentralized routes would be discontinued or handed over to sister companies such as Eurowings or Air Dolomiti.
The low-cost airline was not successful on the Stuttgart-Graz and Düsseldorf-Linz routes, for example. The Airbus jets used proved to be too big for the existing demand compared to the de Havilland Dash 8-400 used by AUA and were therefore uneconomical. In addition, business travelers who value the double daily margin had little or no use for the offer from the Austrian Airlines sister company due to the flight times.
Only recently, AUA announced that it would establish a hub connection with the start of the 2024/25 winter flight schedule period. between Linz and Frankfurt am Main. This is also to be served with high frequency. This inevitably raises the question of whether Austrian Airlines will reverse its withdrawal from the decentralized federal state business. So has the strategy been abandoned and has Office Park 2 recognized that the best money can be made from well-paying business travelers on non-stop flights from the smaller Austrian airports?

Trestl: “Federal states’ strategy has been adapted”
"Yes and no," says Chief Commercial Officer Michael Trestl, who points out that the previous in-house operation with aircraft and personnel stationed in the federal states would no longer have been competitive. The withdrawal from the decentralized federal state routes would have been the right thing to do and the strategy that has now been adapted cannot really be compared with that. Using the example of the planned Linz-Frankfurt route, Trestl explains that the wet lease partner Braathens is responsible for its implementation. It is an established Swedish regional airline that specializes in operating such routes.
The AUA board member emphasized that the partnership with Braathens was designed to be long-term. This would be the key difference to the previous in-house operation. In other words: The Swedes should be able to operate more cost-effectively with ATR72-600 than Austrian Airlines previously did with de Havilland Dash 8-400 and its own staff.
Trestl expressly stressed that there could be no talk of a complete departure from the withdrawal from decentralized routes in the federal states. The manager prefers to say that the strategy has been adapted and that "in a targeted manner and in individual cases" hub connections within the Lufthansa Group could be set up again in a decentralized manner. This implies that further routes could possibly follow, but there are apparently no plans for this, at least in the short term. In any case, the company wants to cooperate with Braathens in the long term.
Ski flights also in winter 2024/25
A completely different matter are the skier flights that are offered to Innsbruck and Klagenfurt during the cold season, for example. Holidaymakers from Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen and Warsaw are to be flown into the Tyrolean capital. Trestl emphasized that Hamburg will once again be connected to Hamburg during the peak season in winter 2024/25. It is completely unclear whether further routes could follow in the area of these special decentralized winter flights.
On the feeder flights from Klagenfurt, Graz and Innsbruck, the annual demand-related reductions will occur in winter 2024/25. However, the offer would have been expanded over the entire year. Braathens is already expected to play an important role as a wet lease partner.

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