German Airlines Step Up U.S. Flights

Lufthansa's budget airline Eurowings will launch flights with its fourth A330 from Cologne/Bonn to Orlando and Seattle from July 2017. There will be twice-weekly services to Orlando and three weekly flights to Seattle.

Other long-haul destinations next summer will include Boston, Las Vegas and Miami in the USA, Cuba (Havana, Varadero), the Dominican Republic (Puerto Plata, Punta Cana), Bangkok and Mauritius. Since starting long-haul budget flights one year ago, Eurowings has flown 420,000 passengers to various destinations in North America, the Caribbean and Asia.

Rival Condor will also add another US destination with the start of twice-weekly flights from Frankfurt to Pittsburgh next June. The airline has already announced San Diego and New Orleans as new US destinations next summer. In total, the leisure airline's long-haul fleet of 16 B767s will serve 39 destinations in summer 2017, including 16 in North America.

Moreover, Delta Air Lines will expand its Germany flights to eight daily next summer with the start of seasonal summer flights from Detroit to Munich in May 2017. “With eight flights a day next summer, Germany will be Delta's fourth-largest European market,” said Dwight James, Senior Vice President Transatlantic.

Meanwhile, Lufthansa, Eurowings and Air Berlin are all facing more turbulence.

Lufthansa's pilots are threatening once again to go on strike over failed pay talks. The pilots’ union Cockpit is seeking a 20 percent pay increase to cover the last five years when there were no salary increases, but Lufthansa wants another year with a pay freeze. Pilots have already gone on strike 13 times in the dispute, which is running since April 2014.

The Lufthansa Group will need to find a new Eurowings boss next year after 60-year-old Karl Ulrich Garnadt announced his retirement next spring. The experienced manager, who has held diverse posts at Lufthansa during a long career, took over as head of the budget airline in December 2015 tasked with building it into an effective competitor on European and long-haul routes.

Air Berlin's finances have worsened after it made a surprising net loss of about €46 million in the third quarter of this year compared to last year's Q3 net profit of €56.2 million, and revenues dropped by 5 percent to €1.23 billion.

CEO Stefan Pichler blamed the loss on tough price competition and restructuring costs, and warned that he did not expect an improvement in the fourth quarter. Normally airlines make their biggest profits in the summer and can thus compensate for losses in the winter season.