Tuesday, November 21, 2017

TUI Group to sell Corsair

Corsair Boeing 747-400
(Photo: Rob Finlayson)

TUI Group plans to sell French leisure airline Corsair International, a source told ATW. According to the French newspaper La Tribune, Rothschild Investment bank has been assigned to find a potential buyer.

TUI Group is a travel and tourism company headquartered in Hannover, Germany.

Including Corsair, TUI Group owns six airlines, five of which were rebranded in 2015: TUIfly (Germany), the UK-based Thomson Airways (which was recently renamed TUI Airways), ArkeFly (Netherlands), Jetairfly (Brussels) and TUIfly Nordic (Sweden).

However, the source told ATW that Cosair’s fleet and business model no longer fits in the TUI Group and that five of its airlines “operate a majority of harmonized Boeing aircraft fleets—for example, 737, 787s” while Corsair operates three aging Boeing 747-400s and four Airbus A330-200/300s.

Two years ago, TUI tried to sell Corsair to Canada-based Air Transat, “but unfortunately the deal was not successful,” the source said.

“We will keep all the AOCs [of its five remaining airlines], but the brands are all unified. Corsair operates to a lot of [French] overseas departments, a complete different business model that no longer fits in TUI’s core business,” the source said.

Corsair operates from Paris Orly to a variety of long-haul destinations across Africa, the Caribbean and Indian Ocean. The airline has around 1,200 employees and carries 1.2 million passengers per year.

This fall, Corsair teamed up with UK-based LCC easyJet and joined the new booking platform, Worldwide by easyJet. 


(Kurt Hofmann - ATWOnline News)

No comments: