Queue at the back for vacation: Travelers wait in front of the counters at Düsseldorf Airport.
Image: dpa
Crowds and short-term flight cancellations annoy vacationers. Lufthansa admits mistakes, but prepares customers for bumpy months. TUI meanwhile asserts that it does not have to cancel any flights with its own airline.
EStefan Baumert, Germany boss of the travel group TUI, claims to have identified a very special sign that this year’s travel summer will be a good one. The number of Google searches for and reviews of sunscreens has more than doubled over the previous year, he reports. And Baumert is sticking with it for its own business, it should be close to the pre-pandemic summer of 2019, in terms of demand from German customers for Mallorca and the Greek islands, TUI has already exceeded the pre-crisis level. But in the last-minute business phase, holidaymakers are not concerned about sunburn, but concerns about getting into great chaos at airports.
At the beginning of the holiday season in North Rhine-Westphalia, there were pictures of queues from the airports that stretched through entire terminal halls, the Lufthansa Group announced the cancellation of thousands of flights, and there were numerous short-term cancellations, especially from the Lufthansa subsidiary Eurowings. Sometimes passengers only found out about cancellations after check-in and baggage drop-off and then ended up at the airport without a flight and without a suitcase. On Sunday, the airport fire brigade in Düsseldorf even helped with the processing of luggage from planes that had arrived.
