Applied to Condor and Eurowings on the same week with B2 English and retail experience. What happens now and which one should I want?
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#1 Hamburg, 25, four years in retail (H&M floor then a department store), B2 English certificate, German native. I have wanted this for a while and finally sent applications to Condor and Eurowings in the same week because I did not want to choose and then regret it.
What I know about each:
Condor is leisure long haul out of Frankfurt mostly, with some Düsseldorf and Munich. Longer flights, layovers in places like Cancun and the Maldives, a heavier training course, and from what I read a stronger sense of one big base. The requirement page wants B2 English and a second language is a plus.
Eurowings is short and medium haul, more bases (Düsseldorf, Cologne, Hamburg, Stuttgart and more), and they hire in bigger numbers. Home most nights. Sector pay structure. Lots of people describe it as the practical option.
My questions:
- Is B2 English actually enough for either, or is that the number on the page and the real bar is higher? My spoken English is fine, my written English is slower.
- Retail experience: does it count as customer service in the way hospitality does? I have handled every kind of angry customer but I have never served food.
- If both come back, which one do people regret less?
I am not asking which airline is better. I am asking which one someone like me should want. Home base matters to me, I have a partner in Hamburg, but I also do not want to spend my twenties doing Palma turnarounds if there is a version of this job with the Maldives in it.
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#2 Condor Frankfurt, four years. B2 is genuinely the bar, the interview is mostly in German and the English part is conversational. Retail counts, I was a Douglas cosmetics counter before this. The thing to know about Condor: if you live in Hamburg you will commute to Frankfurt, and the long haul pattern means being away four to six days at a time. The Maldives is real. So is arriving home at 6am on a Tuesday having lost two nights of sleep. Your partner needs to be ok with that.
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#3 Eurowings Düsseldorf, five years. We have a Hamburg base and it is a good one. You are home almost every night, the money is average, the roster is predictable within limits. People who want a life outside the job pick us. People who want the job to be the life pick Condor or the Gulf. Neither is wrong. Retail is fine, half my base came from retail.
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#5 @jasmin2001 varies. Caribbean is usually a four day pattern, Indian Ocean can be five or six, the Mediterranean and Canary routes are day trips or one night. Over a month you might be away twelve to fifteen nights. That is the honest number.
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#6 Lufthansa Frankfurt here, not either of your options but I did the Eurowings assessment before I got the LH offer. Their group session is very practical: a scenario, a short presentation, some questions in English. B2 was completely fine. If your written English is slower, the written test at Eurowings was short and easy. Condor's I have not seen.
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#7 Applying to both from Berlin as well, so following. One thing I noticed is Eurowings answered my application in nine days and Condor has been silent for five weeks. Might be a sign of how quickly each moves rather than anything about me.
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#8 easyJet Berlin, and I would add the third option nobody mentions: easyJet has German bases and pays sector pay in a way that adds up better than people think. But if the Maldives is on your list at all, Condor is the only one of the three that goes there. Decide whether that is a real want or a photo want.