The battered airline Lufthansa will need “another four to six weeks” to process the corona-related reimbursement of tickets for flights by the end of June. “To date, we have already paid out around € 1.4 billion,” said Lufthansa-Harry Hohmeister in conversation with the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”. However, they want to speed up ticket refunds for canceled flights. “We want to switch the automated processes back on within the next 10 to 14 days. Large three-digit million amounts will then be paid out each month,” announced Hohmeister.
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In total, the Lufthansa board received more than two million reimbursement requests. The number had increased again due to the introduction of a new flight plan on June 29.
It was also six weeks in June
Basically, airlines actually have to refund the ticket price within seven days. Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr had previously promised to quickly resolve the reimbursement backlog, in mid-June there was talk of six weeks. The hotline was rarely available to customers in the meantime, and emails remained unanswered.
As a result of the Corona pandemic, air traffic collapsed almost completely in mid-March and thousands of flights were canceled. Lufthansa and other companies, on the other hand, had initially opted to pay off the customers with vouchers. However, this failed due to the EU Commission. The group recently announced that it would remove the traffic jam by mid-August. At the end of June, however, around half a billion of the reimbursements were still outstanding with around one billion euros.
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Internet brokers had asked the group last week to immediately refund the canceled trips after the state rescue. Their association Internet Reisevertrieb (VIR) asked Lufthansa to put the automatic reimbursement option in the professional booking systems (GDS), which has since been switched off, back into operation. A company spokesman announced on Wednesday that this would be done.
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