Lufthansa to offer free inflight messaging on long haul routes

For those who love to message in the air, Lufthansa is preparing a nice little passenger experience uplift on its long-haul routes, with the airline preparing to offer free messaging on long-haul flights.

The German carrier will introduce free messaging on their flights in the Summer of 20225 on its intercontinental flights. Interestingly, this is not just limited to text messaging (as other airlines have introduced), but they will also allow photos to be sent too.

Passengers can use their smartphone or tablet to connect to the inflight wifi portal and select the free messaging option to message away, regardless of class of travel on the long haul fleet

In Quotes

Dieter Vranckx, Chief Commercial Officer of Lufthansa Group said:

“The introduction of free messaging on long-haul flights is another important step in continuously improving our customers’ overall travel experience,”

”We will continue to focus our efforts on services that are highly relevant to our customers.”

Heiko Reitz, Chief Customer Officer at Lufthansa Airlines added:

“What is already a great success on short and medium-haul flights will also be very popular with our guests on long-haul flights,” says

“Being reachable even during a long flight has long been a basic need and a decisive factor when choosing an airline. Free messages, as well as in-flight internet, for example, therefore offer a portfolio of digital services that is very attractive to our customers.”

A little late to the party – but with its own party trick

Lufthansa is a little late to the free messaging party, considering other group airlines have already implemented free messaging (including SWISS and Austrian Airlines).

However, a lot of implementations so far have relied on text messaging for its “free messaging tier” products – as it is very cheap to do that (text – even when using encrypted data streams has a low data overhead).

Images on the other hand.. can be big, in terms of file size – even with good data compression (and considering how WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal can destroy image quality without even trying), there is inevitably going to be a much higher data overhead. It’ll be interesting how this traffic is prioritized through the networks and out into the world.

The Lufthansa Group airlines SWISS and Austrian Airlines also offer free messaging on selected long-haul flights. The service has been available on short and medium-haul flights with Lufthansa and on numerous Austrian Airlines aircraft since 2024 and has been a great success.

We’ll wait with bated breath when this goes live in the sky.