Things are not going well in the aviation industry at the moment, but rather badly. Advance bookings for autumn, the 2020/21 winter flight schedule and even summer 2021 are extremely low. The Lufthansa subsidiary Austrian Airlines cannot escape this trend either.

Immediately after the “comeback” demand was higher than expected, but the developments of recent weeks in Europe are now also reflected in the AUA. You fly under the business plan and there is no prospect of short-term improvement. CFO Andreas Otto told the workforce that they had planned conservatively and are therefore just about on schedule. However, he warned that Austrian Airlines will now be flying into ten “extremely difficult months”. Advance bookings are “extremely cautious”, especially for spring and summer 2021. The bottom line is currently that the carrier is “below expectations”, writes the daily newspaper “Courier".

The company's liquidity is said to be very good at the moment, thanks to the lavish state aid. The vast majority of the workforce is still on short-time work. An enormous number of machines are still not used. The company puts the capacity currently on offer at around “30 to 40 percent below the previous year”.

Travel restrictions and, in particular, sometimes complicated quarantine regulations are currently making life difficult for all European airlines. Since the nation states do not act in a coordinated manner, but rather in a short-term and solitary manner, the provisions change very frequently. This has a negative effect on demand and means that those who really want or have to travel buy their ticket at short notice. In particular, the low-cost airlines throw an enormous number of tickets, some in the single-digit euro range, onto the market. But the planes cannot be filled with these either and the load factor is catastrophic on many routes. The result is that Easyjet, Ryanair, Wizzair, Lufthansa, Finnair and many other airlines are adapting their autumn and winter plans and making extensive cuts. Lauda even closes the Stuttgart base earlier and the end for Düsseldorf has now been sealed.