- According to its own information, the airline Swiss is canceling around 2900 flights in the winter flight schedule.
- The reasons are corona restrictions and a decline in demand due to the Omikron variant.
- The cancellations mainly affect the period from mid-January to the end of March.
1200 flights have already been canceled in the past few weeks. Now there are another 1700 cancellations. The total of 2900 flight cancellations make up about eight percent of the planned flights, as Swiss spokeswoman Meike Fuhlrott announced to the Keystone-SDA news agency on Sunday. First of all, the “SonntagsBlick” reported on the thinning in the flight plan.
The canceled flights were “due to restrictions and demand,” it said. Passengers would be informed accordingly and alternatives would be offered. The flight cancellations would take place “largely distributed over the entire network”. Above all, Swiss is reducing the frequencies on frequently used routes, “so that as many connections as possible continue to exist”.
Lufthansa is also canceling flights
Swiss parent Lufthansa is also canceling numerous flights in the winter flight schedule due to a lack of demand. Every tenth planned flight is to be canceled, a total of 33,000 connections are canceled.
Lufthansa justified the break this week with “a sharp drop in bookings”. Europe’s largest low-cost airline Ryanair had also announced that it would cut its flight program by a third in January.
The winter flight schedule presented by Swiss in September provided for the same number of destinations as in the winter of 2019 before the pandemic. The plan included 90 destinations. However, the airline flies less frequently. Overall, it was initially planned to offer around half of the capacity of 2019 in the winter flight program.