Chart of the week #27: Who the hell flies to Frankfurt anyway?

A quick look at Lufthansa's Frankfurt and Munich hubs

Frankfurt is Germany’s 5th largest city with a population of 776,000 in 2023, well behind Berlin (3.8 million), Hamburg (1.9 million), Munich (1.5 million) and Cologne (1.1 million). Frankfurt is also Lufthansa’s most significant network hub, with Munich developing as a significant alternative/secondary hub in recent years.

It’s somewhat unusual for a European network carrier not to develop their primary hub in their largest O&D market, like British Airways at London Heathrow, Air France at Paris CDG or Iberia at Madrid. One of the primary reasons that Lufthansa’s didn’t develop Berlin as their primary hub in the post-WWII era was its dislocation from the rest of West Germany, and Berlin’s split into West and East Berlin.

Geopolitics isn’t the only reason, and there’s a strong argument that even in a unified post-WWII Germany that Frankfurt would’ve served as Lufthansa’s primary hub anyway. Frankfurt served as a major logistics hub prior to WWII and the fragmentation of Germany’s population across a larger geographic area means locating logistics hubs closer to the geographic centre of the country made more sense. To put this in perspective, London accounts for 13% of the UK population, while Berlin only accounts for 5% of the German population.

Yet, Frankfurt was the 22nd busiest airport in the world, and the 5th busiest in western Europe, handling 59.3 million passengers in 2024. Given that it’s only Germany’s 5th city, who the hell is actually flying there? Well, the answer is quite simple, most of those 59.3 million passengers are actually just connecting through Frankfurt.

Analysing connecting hubs is really difficult since few airlines share sufficient similarities in strategies and economic models to make a like-for-like comparison. Lufthansa gives us a unique opportunity due to their split hub model. While Munich is a much smaller hub, it’s still substantial, handling 31.6 million passengers in 2024 and making it western Europe’s 8th busiest airport.

This allows us to make a like-for-like comparison between Lufthansa’s operations at Frankfurt and Munich. One interesting point of comparison is the proportion of O&D versus connecting traffic they’re carrying on overlapping routes (i.e. routes which are operated from both Frankfurt and Munich, e.g. Frankfurt-London and Munich-London).