Germany's Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt) has dropped an investigation into allegations of price-gouging by Lufthansa Group units following the closure of Air Berlin (1991) in October last year.
The regulator said in a statement that it initiated the inquest after receiving numerous complaints about Lufthansa (LH, Frankfurt International) and Eurowings (EW, Düsseldorf) hiking their fares on select domestic routes where they used to compete with Air Berlin.
During the initial phase of the investigation, Lufthansa and Eurowings fares for select flights in autumn 2017 were compared with identical flights from the previous year. The investigations focused on the 13 most trafficked German routes. On these routes, a total of 412 flights were sampled on 44 dates. In total, the database included 56,064 individual tickets from Lufthansa and Eurowings.
In the second phase, price data for the same flights from February 2018 was collected in order to understand the impact easyJet's entry had had on the market.
Commenting on the inquest's observations, the President of the Bundeskartellamt, Andreas Mundt, said that following Air Berlin's bankruptcy, Lufthansa's tickets increased, on average, 25-30% year-on-year.
"In certain cases, there were also significantly higher price increases. This price increase is considerable, but does not justify the initiation of an abuse procedure."
"On the routes now served by easyJet, there is now another alternative for consumers. On these routes, prices fell in February 2018 and are about back to the level that was established prior to the departure of Air Berlin. The development of airfares would certainly not have gone so well if Lufthansa had become a permanent monopolist on these routes," he added.
