Lufthansa Group will add new routes and increase flight frequencies across its network for the upcoming summer 2026 season.
The German airline group’s flagship carrier, Lufthansa Airlines, will commence a new direct service from Frankfurt to Trondheim, Norway's third-largest city, from 1 May 2026. Flights will operate four times weekly and will complement the carrier’s existing daily service from Munich to Trondheim.
Lufthansa will also increase flight frequencies to five times weekly on routes from Frankfurt to St. Louis, Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town. Services from Frankfurt to Raleigh/Durham, Washington and Nairobi will also become daily next summer.
Services from Munich to both Sao Paulo and Johannesburg, which were introduced this winter, will be extended to the 2026 summer season. Flights on both routes will operate three times weekly with Airbus A350-900 aircraft.
The carrier on Wednesday (29 October) also announced plans to reduce flight frequencies on several feeder routes throughout Germany “due to the high-cost burden”. More than 50 frequencies will be removed from its 2026 summer schedule, including from routes between Munich and Cologne, Düsseldorf and Berlin, as well as between Frankfurt and Leipzig or Nuremberg.
Additional feeder routes are “under review”, while regional flights from Frankfurt to Toulouse and from Munich to both Tallinn and Oviedo will be discontinued next spring “for economic reasons”.
The cuts are part of the group’s ‘turnaround’ strategy for its flagship airline, which aims to reduce costs and improve operational stability.
Meanwhile, Swiss will commence a new service from Zurich to Poznan, Poland's fifth-largest city, from 29 March, and will also add flights to Rijeka, in Croatia, during July and August.
Additionally, the airline will increase frequencies on routes from Zurich to Alicante, Valencia, Manchester, Montpellier, Tirana, Budapest and Venice, while its five-times-weekly service to Tokyo will become daily in April, May and October 2026.
Brussels Airlines will add twice weekly flights to Kilimanjaro from June 2026, while services to Freetown, in Sierra Leone, will increase from five to six flights per week.
ITA Airways, which joined the group earlier this year, will also resume services from Rome Fiumicino to London Heathrow next summer. Flights will operate twice daily, with further details to be announced “at a later date”.