I’ve got to hand it to Lufthansa. It has rightfully judged the climate change Zeitgeist and now positioned itself to capitalize on it through a new set of so-called green fares. But these “guilt-assuaging” fares actually appear designed increase revenue by offering an elite status incentive to booking them.
Lufthansa Green Fares – Fabulous Marketing To Boost Revenue
There’s a lot of money to be made on the green revolution and airlines stand at the vanguard as relatively modest yet highly visible sources of emission. If airlines can guilt you in “doing your part” you are not only likely to pay more for air tickets and be more loyal to the “responsible” airline, but airlines will pad their bottom line in the process.
Take the new Lufthansa “Green Fares.” Now rolled out on select European routes, you can pay a bit more (or give up a bit of flexibility) in order to “offset” your carbon emissions on the flight. Per Lufthansa:
The choice of our Economy Green and Business Green fares will reduce 20% of flight-related CO2 emissions by the use of sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) and offset the remaining 80% of the CO2 emissions by an equivalent contribution to high-quality climate protection projects.
Practically, a non-refundable green fare is about the same cost as a fully-flexible ticket:
But, Lufthansa will award passengers who book these tickets 20% more status miles and 20% more award miles. Suddenly, there’s a great incentive to book these fares whether you care about the environment or not, especially if someone else, like your company, is paying for your ticket.
It’s genius.
And perhaps this is a great indicator of how the true green revolution must function in order for carbon reduction goals to be successful. Most people are not really willing to modify their lifestyle in the West and in the developing world, there is no willingness to curb emissions. But with the proper incentives, offsets offer a partial solution and people can be bought.
CONCLUSION
I am impressed that Lufthansa has come up with a concept that it can peddle as environmentally conscious while also raising revenue and padding the loyalty accounts of its frequent flyers. While I’m not sure what impact, positive or negative, these fares will make on the environment, I do herald them as a marketing victory for Lufthansa.
Moronic Greta must be proud. These fares will have a positive impact on the pockets of Lufthansa. Everyone else paying these fares and believing they help the planet are morons.
100%
As ever, Lufthansa is merely copying the competition. AFKL have had a similar scheme going for quite some time. Fortunately I get my *G status elsewhere, so I won’t be tempted to throw money at this nonsense.
For FB, doing SAF makes sense if you are a bit short on XPs for your qualification status/buy XPs so you can fly with other carriers as SAF has the best deal for those not based in Europe at ~$11/XP. However, LH only offers an extra 20% in status miles, which is not worth it.
If I wanted to do something to off-set emissions from air travel the last thing I would do is give money to an airline. There are plenty of much more transparent ways of ensuring green growth and somehow this looks like yet another profit centre for Lufthansa who have demonstrated their utter hypocrisy along these lines before.
I am not saying we shouldn’t be concerned about the climate or the environment, wasnt there a huge expose in The Guardian recently discussing how many of these high-profile carbon offsetting activities are actually a giant scam?
I guess reading the news lately about what is going on in Germany – it sounds like LH is taking a more extreme approach to climate change by not flying at all?
I think that’s what ‘high quality’ is alluding to.
But yes, this fare class screams corporate travel to me. Lots of companies have climate initiatives that would allow for expenditures like this, and if the flyer can get more miles than they will jump all over it.
The carbon offset projects Lufthansa will fund through Compensaid seem substantive. The many cookstove projects all over the globe sounded especially promising.
https://lufthansa.compensaid.com/projects/portfolio
What a virtual signaling scam. If I want to impact climate change I’ll make a donation to the organization of my choice and don’t need an airline to do it for me. This is an interesting article on compensate:
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/52613/do-lufthansas-compensaid-schemes-make-flights-carbon-neutral
Thank you for sharing the link – it appears to be an answer offered by a user to a question from another user of the website; however, the answer provides links to very informative articles, especially the research paper regarding proposed improvements to how cookstove projects’ effectiveness should be measured – and doesn’t really support the answerer’s assertion. The paper states that biomass cookstove replacement projects funded by carbon offset efforts do provide great benefits, from both CO2 and health perspectives (54, 65); however, there’s much room for improvement in terms of standards, methods, and measurements for assessing their effectiveness.
Climate change has always been about $$$ or €€€ flowing into the pockets of the environmental grievance industry, virtue signaling elites and companies that appropriate climate hysteria for profit.