To prevent a summer meltdown due to staffing issues, German flag carrier Lufthansa is rewarding its flight attendants with a bonus of €200 for volunteering to work on their days off.
After allegedly rejecting a proposal to add temporary cabin crew for the summer, Lufthansa discovered it was unable to meet the airline’s growing demand for passengers.
The Munich and Frankfurt-based carrier is currently depending on financial incentives to persuade flight attendants to work on their days off, forfeit scheduled rest days, and delay their vacations until the summer rush is over because there is no time left to acquire extra crew.
The UFO crew union claimed that when Lufthansa contacted it to discuss voluntary actions to save the summer, it didn’t come as a surprise. Although the scenes of mayhem from last summer haven’t occurred in 2023, the union said that the hardship being faced by its members still is “palpable.”
Flight attendants can receive an additional €250 for each day they volunteer to work in addition to the €200 rest day working incentive, which reduces their monthly guaranteed vacation time below the required minimum.
Additionally, Lufthansa has agreed to pay €100 to each flight crew member when a service departs below the agreed-upon minimum. Frequently, particularly on long-haul flights, airlines typically crew aircraft with more flight attendants than regulations demand.
Due to a shortage of trained pursers for Lufthansa’s schedule, flight attendants who are required to serve as pursers on long-haul flights will get an additional payment of €100.
Carsten Spohr, the CEO of Lufthansa, acknowledged this week that the airline’s enormous post-pandemic profits were the result of the hard work of its staff.
“Thanks to the great efforts of our employees, we were able to avoid a situation like last summer and once again offer our customers a more stable operation,” Spohr commented as the airline reported second-quarter revenues of 9.4 billion Euros.
“Whether on the ground, in the cockpit, in the cabin or in our maintenance hangars, it was our employees worldwide who made reliable flight operations and the financially best second quarter in our history possible,” Spohr continued.
According to Lufthansa, there hasn’t been any decrease in demand for travel, and sales of tickets between August and December are more than 90% greater than they were before the pandemic.
The airline intends to have 88% of pre-pandemic capacity in the next months, while capacity is still below 2019 norms.
