Last month, the European and domestic passenger traffic at the Lufthansa airport slipped by 0.6 percent, that clearly reversed the growth observed during the previous months with strikes forcing the carrier to cut its flights.

However, Lufthansa posted a 6.2 percent increase in the overall traffic during the month of July, able helped by the 17 percent growth at the Swiss unit of the carrier, that was fully consolidated since July 2007. The load factor eased 0.9 percentage points to 82.9 percent.

Most notably, Lufthansa was badly hit by strikes by the ground staff and cabin crew during the last week of July in addition to walkouts demonstrated by the regional pilots earlier during this month in a series of disputes over pay.

In a statement made in this regard on Monday, Lufthansa observed, "At Lufthansa the effects of the strike are particularly noticeable in the Europe traffic region. Although capacity still rose by 0.3 percent, this was considerably less than in prior months due to the strike. (Traffic) dropped by 3.1 percent compared with the previous year, so that the load factor was also (2.5 percentage points) lower at 73.3 percent.�

In July, the load factor of the group on European and domestic flights came down by 2 percentage points to 74.2 percent. However, in all other regions, the passenger traffic significantly grew phenomenally jumping from 9.7 percent on routes to and from the Americas in addition to 8 percent on Asia Pacific services and about 8.5 percent on flights to and from the Middle East and Africa.