Travel group TUI plans to amalgamate its five individual airlines under a single leadership, bundling key functions together in order to streamline operations.
TUI’s airlines in Germany, the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden currently operate largely separately from each other, with individual management teams.
In some areas, such as purchasing, the airlines already act jointly, but the group comments that “each one worked largely for itself, and each operation had its own top management. That is now changing.”
TUI says the primary goal is not to reduce costs but to “take the complexity out of the system”, creating an airline group that can “hold its own in competition”.
It plans to maintain the units’ brands as they are established in their marketplaces, and individual air operator certificates (AOCs) will be retained for operational reasons. The combined group will have a total of nearly 140 aircraft.
“I believe that there is hardly any airline group that has integrated its individual flight operations as deeply as we are doing now,” states Marco Ciomperlik, TUI’s chief airlines officer.
The restructuring was announced internally in mid-June.
