Lufthansa loses title of Europe’s largest passenger airline to Ryanair

German airline Lufthansa has lost its position as Europe’s largest passenger airline to Ryanair after it announced on Monday that it carried 145 million passengers in 2019.

Despite three waves of strikes by their cabin crews, the airlines of the Lufthansa Group registered a 2.3 percent year-on-year increase in the number of passengers.

This was still less than the 152.4 million passengers carried by Irish airline Ryanair and its subsidiaries, such as Austrian Lauda, in 2019.

While passenger traffic at the airports in Zurich, Vienna and Munich increased in single-digit percentages, the number of passengers served by Frankfurt Airport, Germany’s largest, increasing by just 0.4 percent.

• Success! Traffic grew twice at Budapest Airport compared to 2019 European average
• BUD Cargo City opens in Hungary’s capital

Lufthansa’s cargo segment reported a 2.1 percent decline in 2019.

Although the company’s total cargo capacity was 6.3 percent higher than in the previous year, utilization fell by more than 5 percentage points to just above 60 percent.

Source: Xinhua – Berlin