Swiss International Air Lines (SWISS) has appointed Léa Wertheimer as its new Head of Corporate Communications. Together with her team, she will be responsible for all of SWISS’s external and internal communications from April 2023 onwards, reporting directly to CEO Dieter Vranckx. Wertheimer succeeds Daniel Bärlocher, who left the company in October to take on a new professional challenge outside the aviation industry.
“With her long and varied experience within the communications sector, Léa Wertheimer is the ideal appointee to this demanding position,” says SWISS CEO Dieter Vranckx. “I am greatly looking forward to working with her, and I wish her every success and satisfaction in her new capacity.”
Léa Wertheimer can draw on a lengthy career within the communications sector. She has held her present position as Head of Media Relations at Swiss Post, with responsibility for all the organization’s media work and interactions, since the beginning of 2017. She also led Swiss Post’s Communications Crisis Task Force during the coronavirus pandemic. Prior to Swiss Post, she was a media spokesperson for the Swiss State Secretariat for Migration in Bern from 2013 to the end of 2016; and from 2006 to 2013 she served as an editor with the Neue Luzerner Zeitung and with the Zürcher Oberland Medien organization. She has previous experience in the aviation sector, too, having been an air transport officer at Swissport and a flight attendant with Swissair.
Léa Wertheimer is a Swiss national, and holds a phil. I secondary school teaching diploma in languages and history from the University of Zurich, a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Crisis Communications from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and a crisis communications management diploma from the Deutsche Presseakademie Berlin.
