Due to a lack of staff, Lufthansa and Eurowings will have to cancel hundreds of flights in July 2022. At the Kranich alone, around 900 connections were canceled at the Munich and Frankfurt am Main hubs and removed from the reservation system.
The background is that at many airports you, but also service providers, have too few staff available. At Lufthansa, the cuts mainly affect Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the busy days of travel during the holiday season. It canceled about five percent of the total capacity it had planned for the weekends.
According to company information, the reason should not be a lack of demand, but a lack of staff. This applies not only to Lufthansa itself, but also to security companies, for example, who carry out checks on behalf of the authorities, apron activities and other airport services.
The 2022 summer flight schedule also had to be revised at the subsidiary Eurowings. In the calendar month of July 2022 alone, the low-cost airline canceled hundreds of flights and removed them from sale. The aim is to ensure that flight operations - especially during the summer holidays - can be carried out stably.
The entire industry is currently suffering from an acute shortage of staff. At the beginning of the pandemic, many employers parted ways with numerous employees or, for example in Germany, fobbed them off with short-time work benefits, which are extremely low in the Federal Republic. Many could not live from the latter and have therefore reoriented themselves in other sectors. Although there are many vacancies at airports, airlines and service providers, the companies only receive isolated applications. Confidence in aviation as a “safe employer” seems to have been permanently damaged by the pandemic and the behavior of many employers.
Lufthansa and Eurowings are certainly not isolated cases. Amsterdam Airport and KLM provide new negative headlines almost every weekend. Recently, the handling has literally collapsed due to a lack of employees and the carrier has as a result no more passengers flown to Schiphol. Easyjet had to cancel numerous connections over Pentecost and already has reduced the 2022 summer flight schedule from Berlin. Vueling raised a few days ago completely without passengers off because London-Gatwick has descended into chaos.