If you’re planning to fly on Lufthansa this summer you might want to have an extra, detailed look at your reservation as the carrier has canceled more than 900 flights during July and more at Eurowings.
The airline faces severe capacity issues as a result of a staff shortage that apparently left them no other option than to aggressively cancel flights during the busy summer months.
July will be the first month where these cuts are visible and the flights that have been canceled were already processed so by now these are visible in the reservation record.
RDN reported this weekend that Lufthansa canceled 900+ flights and Eurowings several hundred more.
According to the article, Lufthansa and Eurowings have to cancel flights due to staffing shortages both internally but also at the airport staff and ground handlers. Maintaining a schedule as originally planned would be operationally impossible.
The cancellations are affecting the Lufthansa Hub cities Frankfurt and Munich on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. The number of canceled flights represents 5% of the weekend capacity.
Normally airlines will notify passengers when there have been changes or cancellations but it’s always possible that such notification won’t reach the passenger, especially when there is a travel agent (or OTA such as Expedia) involved. In some cases the contact information is outdated or an email goes to the spam folder.
In any case, it’s recommendable to double check all your Lufthansa and Eurowings itineraries for July to make sure the flights are in order and you aren’t affected by the cancellations.
Those will especially be a problem for customers with connection flights to Frankfurt from German domestic and European destinations.
If this affects a feeder flight to an intercontinental destination the result could possibly be a misconnect or a long layover in case you have to change to a much earlier flight. You could also ask for a rebooking to another Lufthansa Group flight option such as SWISS or Austrian Airlines.
Conclusion
Due to staffing shortages, Lufthansa is forced to cancel 5% of its weekend flight capacity in July and has already canceled 900+ flights with their budget subsidiary Eurowings canceling a few hundred more.
While inconvenient this isn’t as bad (yet) as it could have been and at least it’s being done in advance so travelers have plenty of time to react. I’d still err on the side of caution that there could be more bad news ahead and further schedule reductions are on the horizon. This is so far just affecting hub traffic in July. I can’t see it being much better for August which Lufthansa hasn’t even touched yet.
