KINGSTON, Jamaica — Minister of Tourism, Edmund Bartlett today announced that one of Europe’s leading airlines, Eurowings — a subsidiary of Lufthansa — will begin operating a twice-weekly scheduled service between Germany and Montego Bay, Jamaica.

The announcement was made at a meeting led by Bartlett with Oliver Wagner, the Chief Commercial Officer of Eurowings, and other company executives while attending the ITB global tourism tradeshow in Berlin, Germany.

 “The scheduled flights will operate every Monday and Friday from Cologne/Bonn, and will use their Airbus 330 aircraft which has 310 seats. Flights will run July 3 through to October 27, 2017, and will bring over 10,000 seats from Germany for the summer.

“Already Eurowings has advised us that they will extend the service into the winter with those seats opening up for sale within days,” Bartlett noted in a release from his ministry.

The new scheduled service will complement weekly charter services operated by German air carrier Condor from the German cities of Frankfurt and Munich into Montego Bay.

Director of Tourism, Paul Pennicook noted that the flights, “Will all be scheduled as opposed to a charter, meaning in addition to being sold by any tour operator they can be also booked by the public anywhere in the world on any booking site, for example Expedia and Kayak. It is really a big deal for us as we work to regain a stronger foothold in the German and wider European market.”

Jamaica’s tourism officials are also excited that the flights will be operating out of Cologne/Bonn International Airport, which forms part of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region — the largest in all of Germany with a population of over 11 million.

Today, the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region accounts for roughly 15 per cent of the GDP of the German economy, which would place it economically as the 3rd largest metropolitan area in the European Union and the 16th largest GDP in the world, the tourism ministry added.