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The Airlines had already been struggling due to rise of low budget fledgling air carriers in Europe that put Lufthansa into an uneven competition in the market.

The amount of loss  incurred by the Airlines on day to day basis is estimated to be  €10 to €15 million.

Its impact on German economy was yet to be ascertained, writes New York Times.

The outsize power wielded by the pilots' union of Lufthansa gave them opportunity to force not only tens of thousands passengers to be stranded but also non pilot employees to dance to their tune, which obviously didn't make them happy, said aviation observers.

Dominic Fries, a technical person working in operations, said  pilots might deserve more money "but they should not get it through a strike, they have got to negotiate, this is slowly getting to be too much - they are the drops of water that make the cup run over."

The main issue with the pilots' union is wage increase. Lufthansa pilots earned 30 percent more than the global average, with a  highest ranking captain earning 250,000 euros per year.

Christopher Heiman, a Captain of Airbus 380s, commented: "Right now we are standing at the forefront fighting for the rights of workers, as government and employers realized from the election  of  Donald J. Trump that right wing parties are gaining momentum and they can't just hit us as they did."

Another set of proposal had been forwarded to the pilots' union by Lufthansa  management  which the union said they would examine.

On the face of such traumatic situation, when thousands of flight had been cancelled and bewildered travellers had been knocking every possible source in search of relief the role played by some online travel agents were also criticised.

A passenger  from Toronto,  Radha Bose, who went to Mumbai to visit her family, and on her way back on Dec.1  was accompanied by her ailing mother-in-law  who was unable to move alone because of  infirmity.

At that moment she got an email from Lufthansa reservation informing her their flight had been cancelled.

She immediately contacted her online booking agent Flighthub and  a Customer Service Agent  took all information only to tell her that they could not help her in any way and she should have approached the airline to re-book her flight.

Curiously Lufthansa was at that point neither taking any call from passenger nor was replying to their emails.

However they finally rebooked their flight on scheduled date by another airline after she gave an ultimatum to airline by an email.

Another passenger Peter C. wrote that the non-stop flight from JFK to Frankfurt  was cancelled and he was rescheduled in a flight with four stops which he declined to travel and the airline said the money would be refunded and five minutes later they had sent him a customer satisfaction survey. His called it "plain stupid."

Dean P. said: 'Horrible experience....this is an airline devoid of any decent customer service ethics because after issuing boarding pass they left him stranded in foreign location with no local support whatsoever." He was to travel from San Francisco to Athens in 15 hours which never happened because of the strike and he commented he never dealt with such an  airline before.

MA Waltham was supposed to travel from New Delhi to Boston and  a few before departure from New Delhi he got a text message that Frankfurt Boston flight had been cancelled. As his  wife was due for operation he had to arrange an alternate booking by British Airways from Frankfurt by spending $1700.

Next day when he contacted Lufthansa Customer and asked them for refund and informed them that he had re-booked by spending 1700 dollars they replied: "That was your decision and your problem. We are not liable for it"

Dubbing the airline greedy, he said in the review "so it was my fault that Lufthansa decided to cancel my flight?"

An angry Waltham said the airline reported a record profit this year and in spite of that they were swindling gullible passengers.

Meanwhile, Lufthansa  has made the Vereinigung Cockpit pilots’ union (VC) a new offer to resolve the present industrial dispute. The company is now offering a two-step 4.4% increase in remuneration plus a one-off payment, it said in a press communique. 

"Remuneration would be increased by 2.4% for 2016 and by a further 2.0% for 2017. This latest offer is not linked to any other terms or conditions. Lufthansa is thus meeting a key VC demand. The union has also repeatedly told the media that it would be willing to enter mediation on the basis of an offer of this kind," it said.

“We want to urgently avoid any further damage to our company and finally return to offering our passengers the kind of service they can expect from us,” said Harry Hohmeister, Chief Officer Hub Management of Deutsche Lufthansa AG, at a union information event. “And that’s why we submitted a new offer to the VC yesterday evening.”

“We want to get back to the negotiating table as quickly as possible,” stressed Bettina Volkens, Chief Officer Corporate Human Resources & Legal Affairs of Deutsche Lufthansa AG. “As desired by the VC, we can then successively negotiate on all the currently-open collective labor agreement issues. And this in turn should lead us back to long-term industrial peace and a sound social partnership.”

The VC union has called on its members to take strike action on six days in total in the latest wave of strikes, which began on 23 November. 

 “We assume that the VC will now end its strike action,” Hohmeister added, “and that we can return to normal flight operations from tomorrow onwards.”


(Reporting by Chandan Som in Calgary with additional inputs from IBNS correspondents)