Introduction
On July 31 2009 the Cologne Upper Regional Court ruled on two
aspects of Lufthansa's general conditions of
carriage.1 The Federation of German Consumer
Organization challenged the carrier's practice of refusing to
carry passengers who failed to use their tickets and coupons in the
agreed sequence (ie, they skipped certain segments). The court held
that the trend among passengers of so-called 'non-sequential
use of coupons' or 'cross-border selling' undermined
the airline's tariff structure and was not permitted in the
applied conditions of carriage which formed an essential part of
the contract of transportation between passengers and the airline.
The court also ruled that passengers were not permitted to purchase
tickets for a return journey, but use only the outward coupon of
each ticket (so-called 'cross-ticketing').
