The airline Eurowings is seeing a strong increase in demand for business trips. From September there will be 30 percent more flights than in the previous year, the Lufthansa subsidiary announced. The incoming bookings clearly showed the progressive normalization in this segment, said Eurowings boss Jens Bischof.
The officials of the federal ministries are also increasingly sitting in Bischof’s planes. They happily shuttle back and forth between the offices in Berlin and Bonn. From January to June they bought 4,668 tickets for flights between Berlin and Bonn with a total value of 1,007,775.40 euros.
This means that travel activities have more than doubled compared to the first six months of the previous year, when only 2105 tickets were issued for a total of 445,130 euros. This was announced by the Federal Ministry of the Interior WELT AM SONNTAG.
In addition to the travel activities of the employees of the ministries, those of downstream authorities, the Federal Chancellery, the Federal President’s Office and the Press and Information Office were also counted. A comparison with ticket numbers from the pre-Corona period is not possible because earlier evaluations of travel activities not only looked at employees of the government apparatus, but of all constitutional bodies, according to the Ministry of the Interior.
The aviation swing between Berlin and Bonn has been the subject of discussions for years. As early as 2008, the Budget Committee of the Bundestag called on the Federal Government to take suitable measures to ensure that the presence of Federal Government employees at committee meetings is limited to the “absolutely necessary minimum”. This applies unchanged.
“All departments are still striving to reduce staff trips between the two places of work to what is absolutely necessary,” says the split costs report sent every two years by the Federal Ministry of Finance to the Budget Committee of the Bundestag. The paper, which was last published in March, deals with the costs that arise from the division of official and service locations between Berlin and Bonn. A strict standard applies when assessing the need for business trips, it says.
According to the report, officials’ business travel habits have definitely changed. Strategically important and politically-related priority areas have already been relocated to the Berlin office in recent years. “In addition, the coronavirus pandemic has meant that committee meetings have increasingly taken place digitally,” it said in March. Recently, however, personal meetings have apparently increased again – as in many companies.
Basically, officials travel between the two cities less than they did 20 years ago, that much can be said. This is not only due to new technical possibilities such as video conferences, but also to the fact that the distribution of employees between Berlin and Bonn has shifted significantly to the east over time.
In 2000, of the total of 17,200 posts in the ministries, 61 percent were still in Bonn and only 39 percent in Berlin. By the end of 2021, the ratio had changed continuously in favor of Berlin – most recently it was 71 percent Berlin and 29 percent Bonn. In absolute numbers: Of the 23,638 jobs, 16,854 were in Berlin and 6,784 in Bonn.
Despite the fact that the capital now has a clear predominance, six of the 15 ministries still have their primary office in Bonn. The top dog on the Rhine is the Federal Ministry of Defense with 1364 positions. There is only one ministry that no longer has an official representative in Bonn: the Federal Ministry of Justice. An end to the flight activities between the two cities is therefore not to be expected anytime soon.
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