German airline Lufthansa will scrap the traditional “ladies and gentlemen” greeting to passengers in favor of a gender-neutral alternative. Lufthansa is the latest major airline to do so, after Air Canada and Japan Airlines.
Passengers boarding a Lufthansa flight in the near future will no longer hear “Meine Damen und Herren” or “ladies and gentlemen,” a spokesman for the airline told AFP on Tuesday. Instead, they’ll hear “dear guests,” or “good morning/evening.”
Additionally, passengers will be offered a third gender option during the booking process, alongside “male” and “female.”
The change will be rolled out gradually on Lufthansa flights, as well as flights by Swiss, Austrian, Brussels and Eurowings, which are subsidiaries of Lufthansa. The company told AFP that the change is a response to a “discussion that is rightly being held in society” over gender, and came from a desire “to value all guests on board.”
Though reported on Tuesday, the change has been in the works for nearly a month. A Lufthansa spokesman told Business Insider DE in June that all internal and crew communication would be made “gender equitable” too.
Air Canada was the first airline to drop traditional politeness for modern sensitivities when it replaced “ladies and gentlemen” with “everyone” back in 2019. Like Lufthansa, it also introduced a third gender option on its booking site.
Japan Airlines followed in 2020, but only applied the change to its English-language announcements. Not only is Japanese society less receptive to Western-style wokeness (same-sex marriage, for example, is not legal there), the most commonly used Japanese-language greeting is already gender-neutral.
Lufthansa, however, is a pioneer of wokeness. In addition to its newly sanitized language, the company’s logo on social media remains decked out in rainbow colors, nearly two weeks after the end of pride month.
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