- Lufthansa passengers will be offered a third gender option during the booking process.
- Lufthansa is the latest major air carrier to announce such ‘change,’ joining Air Canada and Japan Airlines.
- Lufthansa spokesman said that all internal and crew communication would be made “gender equitable” too.
Airline passengers boarding a Lufthansa flight in the near future will no longer hear “Meine Damen und Herren” or “ladies and gentlemen,” a spokesman for the airline announced today.
Lufthansa will scrap the traditional “ladies and gentlemen” greeting to passengers in favor of a gender-neutral alternative such as ‘dear guests,’ or ‘good morning/evening.’
Lufthansa is the latest major air carrier to announce such ‘change,’ joining Air Canada and Japan Airlines.
Additionally, Lufthansa passengers will be offered a third gender option during the booking process, alongside “male” and “female.”
The change will be rolled out gradually on Lufthansa flights, as well as flights by Swiss, Austrian, Brussels and Eurowings, which are subsidiaries of Lufthansa.
Lfthansa Group said that the change is a response to a “discussion that is rightly being held in society” over gender, and came from a desire “to value all guests on board.”
Though announced today, the change has been in the works for nearly a month. A Lufthansa spokesman said in June that all internal and crew communication would be made “gender equitable” too.
Air Canada was the first airline to drop traditional politeness for modern sensitivities when it replaced “ladies and gentlemen” with “everyone” back in 2019. Like Lufthansa, it also introduced a third gender option on its booking site.
Japan Airlines followed in 2020, but only applied the change to its English-language announcements. Not only is Japanese society less receptive to Western-style wokeness (same-sex marriage, for example, is not legal there), the most commonly used Japanese-language greeting is already gender-neutral.
