Skift Take
There are few success stories where legacy carriers have been able to make a go of it with a low-cost line, so Lufthansa's success would be a signal to others that it may not be such a bad idea after all.
Lufthansa said that a project to merge some of its European and German domestic routes under a new low-cost brand has started successfully, as the airline grapples with losses at its European short-haul flights.
“The transition is going well,” a Lufthansa spokesman said on Saturday.
The carrier said last year that Lufthansa flights within Germany and Europe, excluding those from its hubs in Frankfurt and Munich, will be merged into its existing no-frills brand Germanwings from January 1, 2013.
German weekly Wirtschaftswoche on Saturday cited an unidentified Lufthansa supervisory board member as saying that Germanwings aircraft were operating at a fuller capacity and ticket prices were higher on average than expected.
This goes a long way towards restructuring Lufthansa’s pan-European traffic which chalked up losses of about 250 million euros ($328 million) last year, the magazine said.
Reporting by Frank Siebelt and Ludwig Burger; Editing by Toby Chopra. Copyright (2013) Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions. 
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Tags: germanwings, low-cost carriers, lufthansa
Photo credit: The logo of German air carrier Lufthansa is pictured at Fraport airport in Frankfurt. Reuters