German national carrier Lufthansa is to launch a twice daily service between Frankfurt and London Gatwick, complementing its existing flights to Heathrow and City airports in the UK capital. The airline currently offers more than 160 flights per week to the UK from its Frankfurt base with up to eleven flights per day to Heathrow and three a day to City Airport, located in the expanding Docklands area of the city.

The new flight will start at the beginning of the Northern Winter schedules on October 30 and will be operated by a 120-seat Boeing 737-500. The carrier currently offers around 15,000 seats a week between the two cities and is the market leader on its two existing routes to the UK capital, carrying an estimated 56 per cent of the 850,000 O&D passengers between Frankfurt and London Heathrow and 49 per cent of the 170,000 O&D travellers between Frankfurt and London City.

The expansion has been made possible by the additional capacity the opening of Frankfurt’s new Runway will create. “Lufthansa’s passengers from across the south-east of England will benefit enormously from the new service with the number of flights on offer from London airports to Frankfurt increasing by an impressive 14 per cent,” explained Marianne Sammann, General Manager UK and Ireland, Lufthansa.

Lufthansa has a strong position the UK market (as we highlighted in last week’s story ‘Lufthansa to Introduce Aberdeen – Frankfurt Link’) and currently operates 22 different routes into the country from seven German cities. The table above shows that it has the largest slice of the market with a 23.0 per cent share, and although it is facing tougher competition from budget operators, easyJet, Ryanair and, to a lesser extent, local rival airberlin, it has actually strengthened its position over the past five years.

In the year ending April 2006, British Airways dominated the market with a 24.7 per cent share, followed by Ryanair with 19.5 per cent. Lufthansa held just 19.0 per cent but increased demand on its trunk routes and the introduction of new links to the UK regions over the past five years has seen it strengthen its position and become market leader.

This will be the only non-stop route between London Gatwick and Frankfurt, although seven German destinations are already served from the UK airport with easyJet and airberlin offering direct links to Berlin, Cologne/Bonn, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Hannover, Munich and Nuremberg.