LTU airline adds weekly service to Munich
Wednesday flights to Fort Myers will be nonstop
LTU International Airways on Thursday announced new weekly air service between Munich and Southwest Florida International Airport, to begin Nov. 3.
The Wednesday flights will be nonstop from Munich to Fort Myers, with a Miami stop on the return flight to Munich. This will be in addition to LTU's Fort Myers-to-Dusseldorf flights, which currently occur on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. German airline Condor offers a flight to Frankfurt on Sundays.
Fares for the new LTU service haven been announced yet; a reservations agent said they likely be released next week.
Nonetheless, local business people with German interests were excited.
Its a really good thing, said D.T. Minich, executive director for Lee Countys Visitor & Convention Bureau.
The southern part of Germany has always been a top market for us. This makes it a lot more convenient for the Bavarians to travel to Fort Myers, Minich said.
A tourist from Munich was similarly delighted.
This is good. I want to fly back in Decem-ber, said Angela Sporer, 31. This is the third visit here for the interior designer, who flew into Miami late in the afternoon on Wednesday and promptly got stuck in end-of-workday traffic.
On Thursday, Sporer was waiting at the local airport for a German friend of her friends in Lehigh Acres, where she is staying.
LTUs announcement is the culmination of several years effort by local airport staff, said Robert Ball, executive director for the Lee County Port Authority.
The airline acted now, Ball said, because European travel is on a rebound, and Southwest Florida continues to be viewed as a very safe destination, and a very ecological destination.
Further, the value of the dollar to the euro makes this a very attractive destination, Ball said.
Munich is not only a popular destination for travelers from Southwest Florida, it also provides convenient flight connections to other European cities including Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Hanover, Berlin-Tegel and Dresden, Ball said.
LTU, Ball noted, plans a schedule shift on two of its three weekly nonstop flights between Fort Myers and Düsseldorf. The flights, on Thursdays and Saturdays, will run an hour later to expand the options for connecting flights in Düsseldorf to cities including Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Stuttgart, Vienna, Zurich and Warsaw.
European-bound travelers will find it very convenient to fly nonstop from Southwest Florida to Munich and make the connection to their final destination in Europe rather than the U.S., Ball said, adding its much easier to change flights in Düsseldorf than in Atlanta, New York or Chicago. In some cases, the savings in layover time could be as much as five hours.
Munich also is a convenient drive from places such as Zell-Am-See, Austria. Thats a mountain resort area about 50 miles south of Salzburg and the hometown of Johann Ehrenreich, a 58-year-old Cape Coral-based home builder. He was at the airport Thursday to meet LTUs flight from Dusseldorf.
You have made my day, Ehrenreich said, when learning of the new service. He thinks many of his friends and customers will use the flight.
LTU is celebrating its 10th anniversary of air service at Southwest Florida International this year.
The airline became the first to provide scheduled nonstop service between the south Fort Myers airport and Europe in April 1994. More than 400,000 passengers have flown on LTU flights between Germany and Southwest Florida.
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