Lufthansa and NetJets once more?

[733driver]

Lufthansa, Netjets To Announce Cooperation | AVIATION WEEK (http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story.jsp?id=news/avd/2010/12/24/01.xml&headline=Lufthansa,%20Netjets%20To%20Announce%20Cooperation&channel=comm)

Lufthansa and Netjets Europe are close to announcing a major cooperation agreement, industry sources tell Aviation Week.

As part of the agreement, Netjets will take over corporate jet flying as part of the Lufthansa Private Jet scheme next year replacing Lufthansa’s own fleet of corporate aircraft. Neither Lufthansa nor Netjets were prepared to comment yesterday.

Lufthansa has used Netjets in the past when it originally launched its private jet offering. But the work was taken in-house in 2008 when group subsidiary Swiss International Air Lines bought Zurich-based Servair Private Charter. The unit—then called Swiss Private Aviation—operated 5 Cessna Citation CJ1s, CJ3s and XLS+ on behalf of Lufthansa.

However, Lufthansa’s clients used the service in a different way than expected. While Lufthansa saw the offering mainly as hub feeding and de-feeding into secondary airports, passengers instead booked many secondary airport to secondary airport trips that became prohibitively expensive for the operator because they mean a significant amount of positioning flights. As a Swiss company, Swiss Private Aviation also was not allowed to fly German domestic routes. The offering was also limited to Europe.

Industry sources say Lufthansa hopes the large European Netjets fleet will make empty positioning flights a much smaller problem and the scheme can be expanded at least to North America through Netjets. Officials say that the Lufthansa Private Jet offering is not in doubt. However, Swiss Private Aviation is expected to shut down with its 60 employees to be transferred to other positions in the group.

[CHR!ST!AN]

Cool. :ok:

[Waldi]

Maybe a light at the end of the tunnel for our JS colleagues! :ok:

Fly save and relaxed X-MAS

WALDI

[natops]

sounds great!

N.,:ok:

[yellow Baron]

Good new's to all of us.....

happy new year..

[south coast]

Maybe a light at the end of the tunnel for our JS colleagues!

Dont get too carried away by this news.

[deskjockey101]

isn't it amazing what people will do when times get tough!!!

Can't remember why it failed the first time............

[Der_Fischmeister]

Sooooo,DC will loose the contracts ?

[No RYR for me]

Now that would be interesting: NJ has a problem selling shares and currently mainly sells cards. If you are thinking about buying a card why bother if this goes ahead when you can fly NetJets without any commitment through LH.... :cool:

That was the main issue before when the market was good and the previous deal fell through... imagine what it is like now since it is a buyers market for LH and they can probably get better terms out of NetJets :E

[Cpt_Schmerzfrei]

@Fischmeister: I believe that Swiss Private Jet was behind Lufthansa Private Jet, not DC Aviation, but I may be wrong.

@RYR: True, but at the same time, LH´s own executive charter department failed, so they might have looked for a replacement. Still I wonder what NJE gets out of it?

[Mike Oxbig]

I guess NetJets get what they originally hoped for when the deal was done the first time -

sale of aircraft shares,

access to Lufthansa very high hour flyers who may consider buying a share themselves providing LH use the deal as it was intended, which is transporting these people between LH hubs and not as a sub-charter,

Kudos of being a LH partner (good enough for LH, good enough for anyone).

Can only be a good thing I think

[falconbis]

Well Netjets pull out from the last deal because the original plan was to fly biz or first LH customers to final destination like Sion Alicante or Biarritz etc.. from FFm or MUN. Example Tokyo -Sion, pax will fly same ticket Tokyo FFm then transfert to netjets to fly FFM - Sion. but in the reality most of the flights were hadoc charter like Larnaca Sibiu etc for LH it was perfect because as a Netjets owner they were paying only operating cost including catering and FBO and no charge for the positionning and the billing was fixed and predictable for 3 years . I remember RS saying after the deal: if we do 1 flight a month for LH it will be a success.. well when we stopped the deal we were flying 10 flights a day , it was so succesfull that LH have burnt their 3 years hours in 1 year which allowed Netjets to pull out from the deal without prejudice. netjets was extremly busy in those days and LH owned only 3 shares so MB decided it wasn t a priority needed by our business.
LH went his own way and found out their small fleet could not handle multiple customers demand plus the cost of the positionning at no charge to customers was killing them, and if charged, the service wld have became prohibitived for Airline customers. They quickly realised that netjets was the best deal for them.
Netjets today have 40 airplane parked waiting for customers, time have changed.. so it is now a win win situation for both carriers specially that LH and partners will benefit from the service in the Us with Netjets US as well.
Plus the fact that the 3600 h required by LH can be provided by Netjets with immediate start ...