Q TRAVEL – The German airline, Lufthansa, has announced that from March 2018 it will start operating two non stop flights per week between the Juan Santamaría International Airport in San Jose (SJO) and the Frankfurt airport (FRA), in the fifth-largest city of Germany and one of the world’s leading financial centers.
The service from San Jose to the German city will be held Thursdays and Saturdays, with the first flight on March 29, 2018, on an Airbus A340-300 with a capacity of 279 seats in Business, Premium Economy and Economy classes.
The flight will leave SJO at 7:50 pm and land in Frankfurt at 3:10 pm the following day; the Frankfurt flight leaves at 1:45 pm and arrives in San Jose at 5:55 pm local time.
Flight time is approximately 11 hours.
In a presentation at the National Theater on Thursday, with the participation of President of Costa Rica, Luis Guillermo Solís and the Lufthansa Group vice president of sales for the Americas region, Tamur Goudarzi-Pour, the airline promotes the flight as the link with the Costa Rican capital city as “the green paradise of Central America”.
For its part, the Costa Rican Tourism Institute – Instituto Costarricense de Turismo (ICT) – points out that this is the second – nonstop – connection offered by the company from Frankfurt to this region (the first is the connection from Frankfurt to Panama).
“Both connections complement each other perfectly. So now passengers will be able to fly to San Jose seven times a week from Frankfurt: twice non-stop with Lufthansa, or five times through Panama with a short flight with Copa Airlines, a Lufthansa partner,” said the statement by the ICT.
The ICT also pointed out its achievements, in only a year and a half the country going from having one direct flight to Europe (Madrid by Iberia) to soon having seven.
Currently, nonstop flights to San Jose are to London (British Airways and Thomson); Paris (Air France), Zurich (Edelweiss); Amsterdam (KLM); and, Frankfurt and Munich (Condor).
What is the difference between “nonstop” and “direct” flights?
A nonstop flight does as its name suggests: flies from one airport to another without stopping. A direct flight, on the other hand, makes stops along the way. Often, passengers traveling on direct flights make a stop at a midpoint airport and remain seated on the plane while some passengers exit and others board.
About Lufthansa
Deutsche Lufthansa AG, commonly known as Lufthansa, is the largest German airline and, when combined with its subsidiaries, also the largest airline in Europe, in terms of fleet size, and the second largest airline in terms of passengers carried during 2016. It operates services to 18 domestic destinations and 197 international destinations in 78 countries across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe, using a fleet of more than 270 aircraft.
Lufthansa is one of the five founding members of Star Alliance, the world’s largest airline alliance, formed in 1997.
