Lufthansa Fined $4 Million For Jewish Passenger Discrimination

Authorities in the United States are levying a substantial fine against Lufthansa for discriminating against Jewish passengers, and are directing Lufthansa to cease and desist from future similar violations.

The basics of Lufthansa’s Jewish denied boarding fiasco

The United States Department of Transportation (DOT) has just fined Star Alliance carrier Lufthansa $4 million, related to an incident that happened in 2022. I wrote about the incident at the time, though to recap, 131 Jewish passengers were traveling from New York (JFK) to Frankfurt (FRA) to Budapest (BUD), for an annual memorial event to honor an Orthodox rabbi.

On the initial flight, some number of passengers traveling as part of this group reportedly failed to comply with the mask mandate that was in place, and caused trouble for the crew. That’s of course not cool. The issue is the way that Lufthansa handled this.

Rather than specifically singling out those who weren’t complying, the captain of the flight instead alerted a Lufthansa security duty manager about the misbehavior of passengers on the flight, telling the manager that the passengers causing the issues were connecting to Budapest.

As a result, the security manager placed a “high priority comment” on the itineraries of all passengers connecting to Budapest. With such a comment, passengers can’t board a connecting flight until an employee reads the notes on a reservation.

Every one of the passengers who had such a comment was Jewish, despite many not having done anything wrong, and having booked through different methods. However, there were no exact details in the notes about which passengers had misbehaved, so at the connecting gate, the decision was made to just deny all those passengers boarding.

The gate situation got super messy, as you’d expect, and police were called. A Lufthansa employee even openly admitted how all people had to “pay” for the actions of some passengers.

As the DOT concludes:

Lufthansa took action that had an adverse effect on these passengers whose only affiliation with each other was that they were of the same religion and/or ethnicity. Lufthansa’s actions impacted passengers who did not engage in problematic conduct. OACP finds that, under the totality of the circumstances, Lufthansa’s treatment of the 128 Jewish passengers as a collective group, based on the alleged misconduct of a smaller number of those individuals, constitutes discrimination based on religion in violation of 49 U.S.C. § 40127.

Based on our review of available evidence, we find that Lufthansa’s staff made no meaningful effort to specifically identify and track the individuals who failed to follow crew instructions to abide by the applicable laws and regulations, and to tailor the consequences accordingly. Those efforts could have included obtaining the names and likenesses of the misbehaving passengers and linking them to the seats they were sitting in. To the extent that misbehaving passengers were out of their seats, Lufthansa staff could have tracked which seats were empty and then identified which passengers took those seats. While these processes may not have been perfect, they would have resulted in tracking the individuals about whom Lufthansa had concerns and would have significantly reduced the likelihood that innocent passengers would be denied boarding for discriminatory reasons. Instead, Lufthansa has failed to show that its crew took any action to document the identities of specific passengers who engaged in misconduct.

Hopefully Lufthansa has now learned its lesson

This story has gotten a ton of attention over the past couple of years, so it’s interesting to see the DOT levying a fine now. In addition to Lufthansa’s CEO personally issuing an apology for what happened, Lufthansa also provided monetary compensation to passengers for the incident. Lufthansa paid $21,000 to each passenger who was impacted by this denied boarding situation.

This includes a settlement of $20,000, plus $1,000 to cover expenses resulting from being denied boarding. The law firm that negotiated the settlement reportedly took 18% of that. Based on the number of passengers involved, that’s well over $2.5 million in compensation, and that’s before the DOT fine.

I would hope that Lufthansa has learned its lesson at this point. The way the airline went about handling this situation was reprehensible, and it’s really unfortunate that not a single Lufthansa employee throughout this whole process thought “hmm, maybe this isn’t the best way to go about this.”

Bottom line

The US Department of Transportation has fined Lufthansa $4 million for discriminating against Jewish passengers in May 2022. Some number of passengers failed to follow mask requirements on a New York to Frankfurt flight. When it was discovered that those passengers were connecting to Budapest, the decision was made to deny boarding to all passengers on a similar itinerary.

The one thing those passengers all had in common was that they were Jewish. Now Lufthansa is (fairly) paying the price for this…

What do you make of the DOT’s fine against Lufthansa?