Starting Thursday, Lufthansa is launching nonstop service between San Diego and Frankfurt, Germany, marking the airport’s fourth overseas nonstop route to an international destination.

The five-day-a-week flights were announced last year, with the start of service to coincide with the beginning of Lufthansa’s extended summer season.

The San Diego International Airport and Lufthansa are marking the occasion Thursday with an “aircraft salute” for the incoming flight and a ribbon-cutting for the late-afternoon departure of the outbound flight.

Condor, a smaller German airline, had begun offering nonstop service between San Diego and Frankfurt for up to three days a week last summer but then announced it would discontinue the flights by the end of last September. The announcement came not long after Lufthansa said it would begin service of its own this year.


Lufthansa’s decision to add San Diego to its portfolio of nonstop routes was made after considerable monitoring of demand for leisure and business travel on its partner airlines, United and Air Canada.

“As we see that demand developing over the years on both the leisure and corporate side via our joint partners, it then goes on the table for a nonstop to that destination,” explained Larry Ryan, Lufthansa Group’s senior director of sales for the U.S. “What we were carrying from San Diego via the U.S. hubs reached a certain level to where there was adequate demand to bring in a nonstop.

“With all due respect to Condor, the end of the line for them is Frankfurt. The vast majority of our traffic between us and hubs in Europe goes beyond Germany.”

He noted that the airline is currently seeing strong demand into multiple cities in Italy and also in France and Spain, with some of those flights just an hour in duration from Frankfurt.


In all, the new flight will connect to more than 150 destinations in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent.

Flights from San Diego to Frankfurt will depart at 3:05 pm. every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, arriving the next day in Germany at 11:20 a.m. Return flights will touch down in San Diego at 1:20 p.m.

Ryan said he expects the frequency of the flights to remain at five times a week but if demand is higher, that could change at the end of the first year. The lowest roundtrip fares on the 279-seat Airbus A340-300 planes for travel through May 1 start at $1,627, the airline said. Fares are lower — $1,177 — for the period between Oct. 28 and Dec. 14.

As part of the agreement to induce Lufthansa to introduce the Frankfurt nonstop, the San Diego airport agreed to spend $750,000 over two years on marketing the new flight, plus waive landing fees of roughly $500,000 the first year and $250,000 the second. Rebates for terminal space rental are also being offered, said Hampton Brown, director of air service planning.


Much of those costs are made up by the added revenues from passengers purchasing concessions at the airport, Brown said. More importantly, the increased tourism trade delivered by the flights will mean more spending at local hotels, which translates into additional room tax revenue to San Diego.

While Lindbergh Field, with just a single runway, can’t approach the number of international nonstop flights that Los Angeles and San Francisco can accommodate, overseas air service here has increased notably over the last several years.

British Airways’ nonstop to London debuted in 2011, followed a year later by Japan Airlines’ service to Tokyo.

Last year, Swiss leisure airline Edelweiss launched seasonal service to Zurich and will resume operations this year between April 2 and Nov. 12.


For now, the San Diego Regional Airport Authority will move away from trying to lure more European nonstop flights and focus its efforts on nabbing a nonstop in Asia and Latin America, Brown said.

“We’re going to pause in Europe for a while to make sure Lufthansa is successful, but we are working with other regions of the world,” Brown said.

While a nonstop to a major city in China would seem the next logical route for San Diego, securing that is complicated by a couple of factors, Brown said.

For one thing, San Diego is at a disadvantage because there already is a nonstop flight to Beijing out of Tijuana’s international airport. Second, under an existing air services agreement between the U.S. and China, there are no more available flight allotments to China’s largest cities, Brown pointed out.


“But the Philippines always pops up as a possible Asia flight and Korea too,” Brown said. “We’re making progress. We’re within a year to a two-year time frame of having something.”


Business

lori.weisberg@sduniontribune.com

(619) 293-2251

Twitter: @loriweisberg