Lufthansa says new low-cost brand off to good start

Lufthansa said that a project to merge some of its European and German domestic routes under a new low-cost brand has started successfully, as the airline grapples with losses at its European short-haul flights. "The transition is going well," a Lufthansa spokesman said on Saturday.
The carrier said last year that Lufthansa flights within Germany and Europe, excluding those from its hubs in Frankfurt and Munich, will be merged into its existing no-frills brand Germanwings from January 1, 2013. German weekly Wirtschaftswoche on Saturday cited an unidentified Lufthansa supervisory board member as saying that Germanwings aircraft were operating at a fuller capacity and ticket prices were higher on average than expected. This goes a long way towards restructuring Lufthansa's pan-European traffic which chalked up losses of about 250 million euros ($328 million) last year, the magazine said.