Tickets for 9 euros to fly with Lufthansa: the news

Tickets at 9 euros to fly with Lufthansa. Hallucination? Error making? No. It is pure strategy, dictated by a desire to stay afloat during the darkest period in aviation history.

It has now been a year since airlines parked their aircraft, bookings went to zero, and airports emptied. The pandemic has hit everyone, flag carriers and low-cost carriers alike, no holds barred. So here are the 9 euro tickets to fly with Lufthansa becoming a kind of "patch" with a view to a future that is imagined (and dreamed) brighter.

The importance of slots

This was announced by Carsten Spohr, CEO of Lufthansa: soon they could be launched tickets at $11 (equal to precisely 9 euros), should this allow the airline to maintain its slots at major airports.

What are the slot? These are the 15-minute windows within which a flight must mandatorily take off. A flight scheduled for 8 a.m. has as its slot the 7:55 a.m. - 8:10 a.m. slot. If it did not take off at 8:10 a.m., it cannot necessarily do so at 8:12 a.m.: it will have to wait until the planes in that slot have all taken off before it gets up in the air. What does this have to do with the 9 euro tickets? It has a lot to do with it. If a company does not take advantage of a slot for at least the 80%, it loses it.

With tourist flights nonexistent and people boarding only for business or necessity, the logic of time slots was put on standby. Now, however, the European Commission has signaled its willingness to reestablish it. Unleashing the "panic."

Tickets for 9 euros to fly with Lufthansa: how the initiative works

During an interview with Eurocontrol, Lufthansa's CEO outlined the company's idea: tickets at 9 euros to keep its slots. The alternative, after all, would be fly empty planes. And 9 euros per passenger is still better than nothing.

"Every airline that depends on the hub system will do everything possible to safeguard its slots. If we were forced to fly empty, we might consider selling our tickets for 9 euros. Giving up essential slots within a hub would cause harm to Lufthansa's staff for years to come. And, the same would happen to other major carriers such as Air France, British Airways or KLM," Spohr said.

Why was his comment met with surprise? Because, over the course of his career, Spohr has repeatedly attacked Ryanair's policy.. Only last June, he called flights at 9.99 euros "economically and ecologically irresponsible," as well as "a detriment to the entire aviation."

The European Commission, for its part, has launched a counterproposal: to keep a slot, instead of using it for 80% it will be sufficient to do so for the 40%. We, however, still prefer tickets to fly for 9 euros with Lufthansa (how to fly with Lufthansa we have told you. here): those would be a bargain!