Lufthansa And Singapore Airlines Joint Venture Grows

Last week at a travel industry event in Sydney, Sabrina Winter, Lufthansa’s Senior Director of Sales for Southeast Asia & Pacific, announced that the current joint venture allowing coordination of operations between Singapore Airlines and Lufthansa is due for a “major expansion,” which will significantly increase connectivity between Australia and Europe.

Six years ago, competition authorities gave their blessing to an agreement between Singapore Airlines and Lufthansa that would allow the two companies to coordinate their operations in their respective “home markets,” Singapore Airlines’ being Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, and Lufthansa Group’s being Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium in Europe.

Last year, however, a revised application was submitted to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission with the stated goal of expanding the joint activity to a much broader range of European countries (34 in total), including the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Iceland, Ireland, and Italy.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) gave its blessing to the expanded agreement in February 2022, which includes three more undisclosed Singapore Airlines market countries. Winter said, “we are looking into growing the flow of people and having additional countries covered and a more harmonised offer,” about the upcoming rollout of fare products under the amended approval.

Winter agreed there had been extensive negotiations on enhancing the leisure offering, including the introduction of special open-jaw cruise rates, but that the joint venture product was currently geared towards corporate.

Lufthansa’s “Allegris” cabin product, which will roll out across the fleet starting in 2023, was also featured at the event. This includes new First and Business class suites and hard-shell Premium Economy seats.

Ms. Winter also mentioned Lufthansa’s faster-than-anticipated local recovery, which has resulted in Australia becoming the airline’s second top-performing market regionally and a return to almost 2019 frequencies in Southeast Asia via its Singapore and Bangkok hubs to Frankfurt, Vienna, Zurich, and Munich.