Lufthansa board member Christina Foerster believes that the group has bottomed out and flight operations have “largely stabilized”. The company wants to react to the currently long waiting times on the hotlines with new hires.
Foerster also told the newspapers of the Funke media group that a short-term relaxation is not to be expected. There would continue to be flight cancellations, with the red pen being used primarily in domestic German traffic. The reason should be that there are usually several connections per day that can be rebooked if necessary. The manager does not expect a significant improvement before the start of the 2022/23 winter flight schedule.
Around 500 administrative employees from Lufthansa are currently helping out at German airports. The reason for this is that there are far too few employees in the various areas of the ground staff. The call centers are also affected by this, as passengers complain about the sometimes extremely long waiting times. According to Foerster, the workforce in the call centers working for the Lufthansa Group is to be tripled this year.
Only recently, a warning strike organized by the Verdi union brought the flight operations of the crane airline almost completely to a standstill. Group subsidiaries and customer airlines were also affected in Frankfurt am Main and Munich, as passage ground handling was only available to a very limited extent or not at all. Lufthansa intends to hire around 5.000 employees this year and next year. On the other hand, 30.000 employees were made redundant in the course of the corona pandemic.
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