Upper Austria pays airline 750,000 euros monthly for Linz-Frankfurt

Upper Austria is paying Danish airline DAT 750,000 euros a month to operate the Linz-Frankfurt route, ORF reports, while passenger occupancy has reached just over 50 percent.

The payments are advances rather than the final subsidy amount. The route will be settled after its first year of operation, when DAT must provide the state with its actual costs and ticket-sale revenue.

Upper Austria has capped the support at 36 million euros over four years. If the final calculation shows that the monthly advances exceeded eligible costs, money could be returned to the state.

The state government said it was not yet possible to make a final assessment of the route. A reliable evaluation would require two years of operations, and the service remains in its planned start-up phase.

According to the office of Economics Minister Markus Achleitner, the route has developed positively since it began at the end of March. Occupancy in recent weeks was around 20 percent higher than in the first months of operation. Media reports put the current figure at about 51 percent.

Severin Mayr, parliamentary leader of the Greens in Upper Austria, criticised the state’s information policy. He said detailed figures on passengers, occupancy, revenue and advance bookings had not been released despite the data being available.

Mayr also called for all relevant financial figures to be disclosed before a decision on the planned takeover of the city of Linz’s existing 50 percent share in the airport.