FRANKFURT — The Lufthansa Group set a new passenger record in 2018, carrying a total of 142 million passengers on over 1.2 million flights.

Its 2018 seat load factor sat at a healthy 81.4%, while its aircraft load factor was higher than ever before, said the Group.

The growth drivers for the network airlines were the Zurich hub and the Munich and Vienna hubs, with passenger growth of 9.5%, 9.3% and 8.5%, respectively. The number of passengers at the Frankfurt hub grew by 4.7% in 2018, while Eurowings also contributed to the Lufthansa Group’s new passenger record last year with growth of 18%.

In December 2018 alone, the airlines of the Lufthansa Group, which Lufthansa, SWISS, Austrian Airlines, Eurowings, Brussels Airlines and SunExpress, welcomed around 10 million passengers onboard their aircraft. This corresponds to an increase of 6.9% over the same month in 2017.

Its network airlines – Lufthansa, SWISS and Austrian Airlines – carried a total of some 7.3 million passengers in December, up 5.8% than in the same month in 2017. The number of seat-kilometres offered in December was 9.2% up on the same month in 2017, while the seat load factor fell by 0.1 percentage points to 78.7%.

In total, the network airlines carried approximately 104 million passengers last year, 7.4% more than in the same period the year before. The seat load factor for network airlines rose by 0.4 percentage points to 81.5% during this period.