Lufthansa has financially compensated Jewish travelers who were denied onward flights to Budapest in May because of a dispute about wearing masks. An agreement was reached with the “vast majority of passengers,” said a company spokesman confirmed a report by the industry service Simple Flyingwho was the first to report on the agreement.
The Lufthansa spokesman did not comment on the details of the agreement. The magazine report states that each of the 128 passengers affected received US$ 21,000, the equivalent of just over 20,000 euros. The incident cost the airline around 2.6 million euros. Far worse, however, is probably the impression that was created at the time. The airline was accused of anti-Semitism and in that situation proved unable to operate orderly and comprehensible communication.
What happened? On May 4th of this year, a large group of Orthodox Jews traveled from New York to Budapest, stopping at Frankfurt Airport. They completed both flights with Lufthansa. Some passengers on the transatlantic flight apparently refused to wear corona protective masks. Lufthansa therefore decided to refuse the onward flight to Budapest. Apparently, the airline only used the external appearance of the passengers as an exclusion criterion. All outwardly orthodox-Jewish-looking passengers were canceled. From the incident there is also a videowhich apparently one of those affected recorded.
In retrospect, Lufthansa had to apologize. It was wrong “that the larger group was not allowed to continue their journey instead of limiting this decision to individual people,” the company said in a statement. Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr apologized to representatives of the Jewish community in Germany at the time. He also wrote in a letter to the workforce: “Anti-Semitism has no place at Lufthansa. The procedure should not have happened in this way and must now be fully clarified.”