Lufthansa City Airlines’ First Destinations Unveiled

In the second half of 2023 Lufthansa announced the rather confusing creation of City Airlines. An airline with its own air carrier certificate which will mainly concentrate operations on short to medium haul flights in Europe from LH’s main hubs. Now, a few months down the road with just a few months away from operations starting, the Lufthansa Group has unveiled the first destinations the carrier will be operating flights to.

In this post:

• Where Will Lufthansa City Airlines Start Flying To?
• What About the Fleet?

Where Will Lufthansa City Airlines Start Flying To?

City Airlines is quite a confusing concept introduced by Lufthansa. In many ways it seems more of a way for the group to move current CityLine contracts to this new carrier with different conditions apply to them. There are a lot of overlapping areas of operation between City Airlines and CityLiner, starting from the name.

However setting aside the confusion of the name and how the new carrier falls into the Lufthansa puzzle, we now know where it’ll operate its first services to.

Starting from the Summer season of 2024 the carrier will be operating flights from its base in Munich (MUC) to:

• Berlin
• Hamburg
• Bremen
• Düsseldorf
• Cologne
• Hanover
• Birmingham
• Bordeaux
• Manchester

However later in 2024 the airline will be also adding new destinations to the ones above. The main limitation Lufthansa City will be facing in its first months of operations is the lack of available plane in its fleet.

What About the Fleet?

LH City Airlines will initially operate a fleet of only 2 planes in summer of 2024. The fleet will increase to 4 units later in the year. The two planes will be transferred over to this new division from Lufthansa and are 2 Airbus A319-100. These planes are configured with a very standard one class cabin featuring 138 Recaro BL3520 “NEK” in a 6 abreast layout.

Business class is situated in the first rows of the plane. However it is simply made up of Economy Class seats with the central of each set of 3 blocked off. In essence the standard European Business class experience.

The brand new airline will later on be receiving part of the 40 Airbus A220-300s ordered just recently by the group. Until then passengers will have to travel on the much older A319s.