In March 2019, the Lufthansa Group airlines welcomed more than 11 million passengers. This shows an increase of 1.7% compared to the previous year's month. The available seat kilometres were up 4.9% over the previous year, at the same time, sales increased by 4.1%. In addition as compared to March 2018, the seat load factor increased by 0.7 percentage points to 80.5%. This is partially due to the postponement of the Easter holidays, which fell into March last year.
The network airlines Lufthansa, SWISS and Austrian Airlines carried a total of around 8.4 million passengers in March, 2.5% more than in the same month last year. The number of seat-kilometres on offer was increased by 4.4% compared with the previous year. Sales rose by 3.2% in the same period. This reduced the seat load factor by 1.0 point to 80.2%.
Eurowings (including Brussels Airlines) carried around 2.9 million passengers in March. Among this total, 2.6 million passengers were on short-haul flights and 295,000 flew on long-haul flights. This corresponds to a reduction of 2.1% on short-haul routes and an increase of 15.3% on long-haul routes compared with the previous year. A 7.3% increase in capacity in March was offset by an 8.2% increase in sales, resulting in an 82.1% increase in seat load factor of 0.7 points.
