Austrian Airlines and the merged regional airline Tyrolean Airways were once omnipresent at the Austrian state airports and offered numerous non-stop and direct flights. Since the beginning of the 2000s, their presence has been gradually reduced, before it was announced a few years ago that the stations would be closed and the decentralized routes would be discontinued or handed over to sister companies such as Eurowings or Air Dolomiti. The low-cost airline was not successful on Stuttgart-Graz and Düsseldorf-Linz, for example. The Airbus jets used proved to be too large for the existing demand compared to the de Havilland Dash 8-400 used by AUA and thus uneconomical. In addition, business travelers who appreciate the double daily margin could do little or nothing with the offer of the Austrian Airlines sister company due to the flight times. Only recently, AUA announced that it would be establishing a hub connection between Linz and Frankfurt am Main at the start of the 2024/25 winter flight plan period. This will also be served with high frequency. This inevitably raises the question of whether Austrian Airlines will reverse its withdrawal from the decentralized federal state business. So has the strategy been abandoned and has Office Park 2 recognized that the best money can be made with well-paying business travelers on non-stop flights from the smaller Austrian airports? Trestl: “Federal state strategy has been adapted” “Yes and no,” says Chief Commercial Officer Michael Trestl, who points out that the previous in-house operation with aircraft and personnel stationed in the federal states would no longer have been competitive. The withdrawal from the decentralized federal state routes would have been the right thing to do and the now adapted strategy could therefore be used to