The airlines that make up the Lufthansa Group carried a record 106 million passengers in 2011.

A total of 106.3 million passengers chose to fly with Lufthansa, SWISS, Austrian Airlines, bmi and Germanwings. This is equivalent to growth of 7.5 per cent compared with the previous year.

The Group increased its capacity by 9.8 per cent overall in 2011, while its revenue seat kilometres rose by 7.0 per cent. The average passenger load factor for the aircraft correspondingly fell by two percentage points to 77.2 per cent.

The trend of decreasing sales that emerged in autumn continued in the remaining months of the year – Group-wide, it proved impossible to match the level of sales growth recorded at the beginning of the year.

In the light of this development and ongoing economic uncertainty, the Passenger Airline Group plans to achieve low-level growth of 3 per cent in its available seat kilometres in the full year 2012. This will be realised by using larger aircraft and introducing the new European cabin on Lufthansa Passenger Airlines’ European routes.

A total of 65.5 million passengers flew with Lufthansa-brand planes in 2011 – 11.1 per cent more than in the previous year. Lufthansa expanded its capacity by 11.8 per cent in the full year, while sales were up 8.8 per cent. The load factor was 2.2 percentage points down year on year, at 77.2 per cent.

In 2011, SWISS carried approximately 16.4 million passengers, at Austrian Airlines passenger numbers came to 11.3million, around 5.7 million passengers chose to fly with bmi, and Germanwings had approximately 7.5 million passengers.