New sales structure for airlines in the Lufthansa Group (incl. Brussels Airlines)

To meet the demands of a changing competitive environment, the Lufthansa German Airlines’ Sales, Product & Marketing division will be fundamentally re-organized from 1 March 2015. Included among the more significant changes are the bundling of the airline group’s field sales under one management responsibility, and the customer oriented and efficient restructuring of the division with regard to the development of innovative products and the use of new technologies. These changes represent a project within the area of action “Effective and Efficient Organisation”. This is one of seven key areas of action to safeguard the future viability of the Group.

The field sales organizations of all Lufthansa Group airlines (Lufthansa, SWISS, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines and Germanwings) will be placed under single management. To this end, the current local, already largely integrated airline group sales will be bundled by the newly created role of Head of Group Field Sales for the Lufthansa Group. In the future, this person will have overarching responsibility for the management of all topics relating to field sales within the sales regions worldwide as well as within the home markets of the Lufthansa German Airline Group. According to the new concept, both regional Lufthansa area managers and the respective area manager of the group airlines will report to this new manager. The new Head of Field Sales will in the future be responsible for higher level coordination of the key account management teams worldwide of all five group carriers. They will report to the member of the Lufthansa German Airlines Board for Sales and Marketing, Jens Bischof, in his additional role as Chairman of the Chief Commercial Officer Board of the Lufthansa Passenger Airline Group. The aim is to primarily offer corporate clients and travel agents a harmonized and individually tailored service from the entire Group’s product range, whereby these will keep their current contacts. In addition, this will allow more effective coordination of tariff and sales products between the group airlines as well as more rapid placement in the markets.

“This re-organization should make the Lufthansa German Airlines Group’s sales divisions more efficient in view of the growing market dynamics and new technical sales possibilities,” explained Harry Hohmeister, member of the Executive Board of Deutsche Lufthansa AG, responsible for the group airlines and logistics. “We want to be able to offer our customers a consistent flight program that can be better combined across all our airlines in the Lufthansa Group – and which should be available in one place at any time.”

In the course of the re-organization, the Lufthansa German Airlines Sales, Product & Marketing division with its global sales and key account management, product develop-ment, marketing and revenue management will be re-organized into four divisions, and thus efficiently realigned into a new Group process logic. The new structure reflects the development cycle of new innovative products and sales offers. The responsibilities will be re-established in the four areas of “Customer Experience and -Innovation”, “Product and Provider Management”, “Marketing” and “Automated Sales, Pricing and Distribution”, which are designed to further improve customer satisfaction through innovative, digital and personalized services.

“With the new Customer Experience and Innovation division, we are creating a structured framework for a new customer experience along the entire travel chain – from booking to customer feedback management,” says Jens Bischof. “We will increasingly personalize our offer and expand our quality leadership in the airline industry with comprehensive invest-ment in our product.” The “System Sales”, in which all automated online sales activities and projects are initially merged, is located next to “Pricing” in the “Automated Sales, Pricing and Distribution” division. “This enhances our expertise in future technologies and accelerates their development,” Bischof explained further. All divisional heads will report to Jens Bischof, member of the German Airlines Board for Sales, Product and Marketing. As a result of the new structure, the departments of both divisions “Global Sales Channel Management and Sales Management” and “Product & Marketing” will be regrouped in the Lufthansa German Airlines Board division. The current vice president Christian Tillmans and senior vice president Dr Reinhold Huber will both shortly assume their new manage-ment positions in the Lufthansa Group.

Deutsche Lufthansa AG
Media Relations Lufthansa Group 05.12.14