Earning Its Stripes: Condor CEO on Life After Lufthansa
Photo Credit: A Condor Airbus A330-900 at New York JFK. Vincenzo Pace
Skift Take
Condor’s stripey planes grab the attention, but CEO Peter Gerber’s bigger challenge is turning a decades-long leisure specialist into a credible network competitor to Lufthansa.
Leaders of Travel: Skift C-Suite Series
What are the top trends impacting hotels, airlines, and online bookings? We speak to the executives shaping the future of travel.Condor is not a name that rolls off the tongue for most U.S. travelers. Yet the German carrier – with its hard-to-miss candy-striped jets – flies into more than a dozen points across the Americas, and around 40% of its summer transatlantic passengers are American.
CEO Peter Gerber, who took the controls in February 2024 after more than three decades inside the Lufthansa Group, is keen to close the recognition gap.
The airline is trying to reposition itself from a traditional German leisure carrier into something more ambitious: an independent network airline capable of competing directly with Lufthansa on both short- and long-haul flying.
He sat down with Skift to discuss Condor's pivot away from its former parent company, its growth ambitions, and how bookings for this summer's World Cup are tracking.
Losing the Lufthansa LifelineFor more than half a century, Condor was the leisure arm of the Lufthansa Group before being sold t
