Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett yesterday announced that one of Europe's leading airlines, Eurowings, a subsidiary of Lufthansa, would begin operating a twice-weekly scheduled service between Germany and Montego Bay.

Lufthansa is one of the world's biggest airline companies, and service to Jamaica begins on July 3.

Bartlett made the announce-ment during the just-concluded ITB Trade Show in Berlin.

According to him, the flights will operate every Monday and Friday from the Cologne Bonn International Airport.

"Eurowings will use their Airbus 330 aircraft, which has 310 seats. Flights will run July 3 through to October 27, 2017, and will bring more than 10,000 seats from Germany for the summer," Bartlett told The Gleaner.

He said that already, Eurowings advised that it would extend the service into the winter, with those seats opening up for sale within days.

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, who is also in Germany, said that the flights "will all be scheduled as opposed to a charter, meaning, in addition to being sold by any tour operator, they can also be 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".

Jamaican tourism officials are excited at the fact that the flights will be operating out of the Cologne Bonn International Airport, which forms part of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region, the largest in all of Germany, with a population of more than 11 million people.