As I mentioned last night, a press conference was held this morning in Abu Dhabi between by the leadership of Lufthansa and Etihad Airways as they announced an expansion of their relationship.

If you remember from yesterday, I wrote about Lufthansa assisting Etihad’s MRO operations as well as Lufthansa’s LSG Skychefs catering business to start providing catering for Etihad flights.  Here are additional details:

The deal for the aircraft maintenance and catering is worth $100 million.   The catering part of the agreement includes a 4 year contract by which Lufthansa will provide all of the catering services for Etihad flights in 16 cities through Europe, the Americas, and Asia.   LSG Skychefs will be Etihad’s largest supplier of on board catering outside of Abu Dhabi (Etihad’s home base).

The MRO part of the deal includes a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ that will see Lufthansa Technik and Etihad work as a team to provide a variety of maintenance services to Etihad’s fleet as well as Etihad’s partner airlines such as Alitalia and Air Berlin.

Also part of today’s announcement was the fact that there will be expansions to this relationship as time goes on.   It was noted that there may be additional agreements covering passenger services and cargo.

A new part of their cooperation that was announced today stated that Etihad will move its operations in Munich and Frankfurt to terminals where Lufthansa flights operate from.   For Munich, this means no longer will Etihad have to suffer in the dreary Terminal 1.  They’ll be moving their operations to Terminal 2 and Satellite Terminal 2.  In Frankfurt, this means that Etihad will now fly from Terminal 1, whereas perviously they were operating out of Terminal 2.

This makes all the sense in the world because of the new codeshare arrangements that have been created between Etihad and Lufthansa.   It would make for bad logistics if passengers had to travel between terminals and go through multiple security checks to get to their codeshare flights.

And no, there was no announcement about Etihad joining Star Alliance.