TUIfly

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TUIfly is a German airline based in Langenhagen and based at Hannover Airport. It is a subsidiary of TUI and a member of TUI Airlines.

History

Hapag-Lloyd flight

Hapag-Lloyd Flug was founded in 1972 as a subsidiary of the shipping company Hapag-Lloyd. On 30 March 1973, the flight began with a Boeing 727 on the route from Hamburg to Ibiza.

In January 1979, Bavaria Germanair was integrated into the company. Through the acquisition, the company received its first two Airbus A300 wide-body aircraft.

Hapag-Lloyd flight mainly operated charter flights to tourist destinations around the Mediterranean Sea. After delivering the Airbus A310-300, the company also flew to long-haul destinations from the late 1980s, including New York City, Toronto, Malé, Mombasa and the Dominican Republic. Almost all long-distance connections were discontinued after a relatively short time, only the flights to the Dominican Republic were maintained even longer.

The low-cost airline Hapag-Lloyd Express (HLX for short), founded in 2002, was not a subsidiary of Hapag-Lloyd Flug but an independent company of the TUI group. Since its founding, however, Hapag-Lloyd Flug and Germania have been responsible for wet-leasing HLX flights, as HLX did not operate its own fleet.

In 2001, the last long-haul routes were discontinued and the A310-300 used for this purpose were used on the remaining shorter routes with high passenger volumes. Since then, the farthest destination has been in Cape Verde with a flight time of six hours. In 2004, Hapag-Lloyd Flug introduced the frequent flyer program bluemiles. The name bluemiles, a reference to the company's airplanes, which were mainly painted blue at the time, was later also retained for TUIfly, although TUIfly has the color yellow as a distinguishing sign.

Hapagfly

As part of the unification of the brand image, TUI established the umbrella brand TUIfly, announced as an alliance, for all national holiday airlines of the Group from 2005. The Hapag-Lloyd Flug brand was replaced by Hapagfly and the TUI logo in both marketing and aircraft painting. Analogously, almost all other sister companies received the suffix -fly, Corsair became Corsairfly.

In the same year, all but one Airbus A310-300 were sold to other airlines. An Airbus A300 chartered by Lufthansa was initially retained, but until mid-November this year it was chartered to Swiss International Air Lines for the scheduled service to Africa and then returned to Lufthansa. The Airbus aircraft were replaced by the purchase of new Boeing 737. Hapagfly last had a seat utilization rate of 88.3 percent in the summer of 2006.

TUIfly