Lufthansa Group: How Five National Carriers Became One

Fly Swiss to Zurich, Austrian to Vienna, Brussels Airlines to Belgium, or ITA Airways to Rome, and you’re flying Lufthansa Group four different times without ever touching a plane branded Lufthansa. That’s the deliberate strategy. Since 2005, Lufthansa has bought four separate national flag carriers, one after another, and kept every one of them flying under its own name, its own livery, its own frequent-flyer programme. Why?

Why keep the brands instead of merging them?

The obvious move would be to repaint every acquisition into Lufthansa’s own livery, the way a normal corporate acquisition consolidates a brand. The reason Lufthansa doesn’t: national identity sells seats on national routes. An Austrian passenger books Austrian Airlines partly out of loyalty a repainted “Lufthansa Vienna” wouldn’t carry — and losing that loyalty would cost more in lost bookings than it would save in marketing budget. Slot rights at each carrier’s home hub are also tied to the operating airline’s own Air Operator’s Certificate in ways that don’t transfer cleanly to a different brand, so keeping the legal entity alive keeps the slots alive. The multi-brand structure isn’t sentimentality; it’s slot preservation and demand preservation dressed up as heritage.

Where the real synergies land

The savings Lufthansa actually captures sit almost entirely behind the scenes: joint aircraft procurement (a single group-wide order gets better per-unit pricing than five separate national carriers negotiating alone), shared maintenance and MRO capacity, consolidated IT and revenue-management systems, and route rationalisation — overlapping city-pairs between group airlines get consolidated onto whichever carrier has the stronger slot position or lower cost base at that specific airport. None of this requires a shared paint scheme.

The ITA Airways test

ITA Airways is the newest and most closely watched addition, structured as a phased takeover rather than a clean acquisition: Lufthansa holds 41% as of 2024, with a path to full ownership by 2033 contingent on ITA hitting agreed performance milestones, while the Italian state retains the remainder in the interim. ITA itself only exists because Alitalia — Italy’s previous flag carrier — went through repeated bankruptcy restructurings before being wound down and relaunched as a smaller, leaner ITA in 2021. Whether Lufthansa’s phased-ownership model succeeds where a faster full acquisition might have is one of the more interesting live experiments in European airline consolidation right now — and the early signal is genuinely positive: ITA contributed a positive €90 million to group earnings in 2025, its first meaningful profit contribution since joining.

What the numbers actually show, 2025

2025 was the strongest year in Lufthansa Group’s hundred-year history by the numbers that matter: group revenue topped €39.6 billion, adjusted EBIT rose 20% year-on-year to €2 billion, and the operating margin climbed to 4.9%. But the segment breakdown tells a more interesting story than the headline figure. The core Lufthansa brand itself only just returned to positive operating territory — an adjusted EBIT margin of just 0.9%, after improving its annual result by roughly €250 million — meaning the flagship carrier is still the weakest link in its own group by margin, not the strongest. Passenger revenue across the group rose 3% to €30.1 billion, but two other divisions did much of the real work: Lufthansa Cargo’s operating profit jumped 30% to €324 million on strong Asian demand, and the group’s MRO (maintenance and repair) division posted €603 million in adjusted EBIT — a reminder that Lufthansa Group’s profitability increasingly depends on businesses adjacent to flying passengers, not just the passenger business itself.

That pattern — core brand underperforming its acquired subsidiaries and adjacent businesses — is worth sitting with. It suggests the multi-brand strategy isn’t simply insurance against losing national loyalty; it’s increasingly load-bearing for the group’s actual profitability, since Swiss and Austrian have historically run tighter cost bases than the German mainline operation, burdened as it is by higher German labour costs, aviation taxes and unionised ground-staff agreements that Zurich and Vienna don’t carry in the same form.

Sources & Further Reading

• Lufthansa Group acquires 41% stake in ITA Airways — ch-aviation ↗
• The Lufthansa Group Airline Brands — Simple Flying ↗
• Lufthansa Group 2025 Full-Year Results — Official Newsroom ↗