Skift Take
Lufthansa has spent much of 2012 rethinking its post-BMI strategy as well as how it will take on rival Gulf airlines that are gaining slots and winning customers across Europe.
Deutsche Lufthansa AG slipped further behind European market leader Air France-KLM Group after the German company’s disposal of U.K. carrier BMI led to a dip in annual traffic, the standard measure for ranking airlines.
Lufthansa’s passenger traffic -- the number of customers carried multiplied by the distance flown -- fell about 1 percent to 206 billion revenue passenger kilometers, or RPKs, last year, Bloomberg calculations based on data from the carrier show.
That’s 9 percent lower than at Air France-KLM, where the total increased 2.1 percent to almost 224 billion RPKs, with the gap between the pair widening from 5 percent in 2011. IA
