LH abolishes duty-free sales on board

Cigarettes, perfume, etc. will soon no longer be available on Lufthansa long-haul flights. The airline had already reduced in-flight sales in February, and now it plans to eliminate them entirely.

In February, onboard sales were reduced by those routes that had proven economically unviable in the past, according to the airline. After extensive analyses, the decision has now been made to completely discontinue onboard sales in their traditional form in September. This is reported by the aviation magazine aeroTELEGRAPH. Passengers are shopping less on board than before, and the products are taking up storage space that is increasingly needed for other things, the airline says. The online catalog and the Worldshops at the airports are not affected.

The decision against in-flight sales is not new: The Dutch airline KLM announced in 2018 that it would no longer sell cigarettes on board. A year later, it stopped in-flight sales on intra-European routes and in 2020 on long-haul routes as well. Delta Air Lines and US carriers such as United and American Airlines also discontinued in-flight sales years ago. Finnair followed suit in 2023.

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