Estonia’s national carrier Estonian Air worked together with Lufthansa Consulting to develop a new innovative consultancy product to improve network planning and scheduling for smaller airlines. The Baltic airline has announced a new network strategy focusing on pragmatic growth.

Regardless of the size of the fleet, every airline has expenses incurred by their fleet and network planning units which use different databases and systems. With the new special solution “Rent-a-plan” airlines benefit from continuous network planning support at a minimum cost. They enjoy access to the most advanced network planning tools, data, advanced methodologies and skills from a specialist partner instead of extending “in-house” resources and investing additional funds for these tasks. Lufthansa Consulting’s dedicated personnel support carriers using this approach throughout the entire planning workflow such as long-term (once every three years), mid-term (once a year) and short-term (twice a year prior to season start). Estonian Air and Lufthansa Consulting are using the network planning tool powered by LiftPlan as a technical platform for the “Rent-a-plan” service.

“In order to develop schedules and network, we constantly need to analyze people’s travel patterns and the competition situation on the market. We worked with Lufthansa Consulting already in the past, but now for the first time, we have access to needed information and data systems in a customized and cost efficient way, so that our analysts can make decisions based on state of the art technology in the field of commercial planning,” says Estonian Air’s Chief Commercial Officer Rauno Parras.

“Rent-a-plan” boosts quality and speed of planning at small and medium size airlines without additional overhead costs", states Ala Toukatli, Partner and Principal Airline Strategy and Network at Lufthansa Consulting. “We are pleased to see that Estonian Air is once again a pioneer and innovator and the other airlines across the globe recognizing the practical value of our approach”.

Estonia is the fastest growing aviation market in Europe and Estonian Air has achieved year on year growth of 24%. The airline already uses “Rent-a-plan” service in practice successfully and the tool is in great demand in the market. A group of interested clients will attend Lufthansa Consulting’s launch workshop during the “Wings of Russia International Aviation Forum” from 11 – 12 October 2011 in Moscow. The aviation experts will introduce the concept and present Estonian Air’s success story. They will also share their experience with supporting airlines world-wide.