Almost six years after the bankruptcy of the airline, the brand Air Berlin was sold. While the transfer of the rights to the new owner happened in late June, the news was first reported by Swiss aviation news website aeroTELEGRAPH.com this week. The price tag for the naming rights, as per the website, was EUR120,190.
The buyer, according to aeroTELEGRAPH, was Air41, a German company that provides technology services to the airline industry. Its founder, Marcos Rossello, has founded Sundair, an airline headquartered in Stralsund, Germany, and its sister company, Fly Air41, based in Zagreb, Croatia. Sundair is focused on leisure destinations, while Fly Air41 currently only flies on behalf of Sundair.
«Yes, we have acquired Air Berlin’s brand rights», Rossello told the Swiss aviation news outlet. The executive, however, did not reveal what the plans for using the Air Berlin name are.
In May, according to travel news website Touristik Aktuell, Rossello transferred a majority stake in both Sundair and Fly Air41 to Schauinsland-Reisen, a German tour operator from Duisburg. Up until Sundair’s COVID-19 restructuring in 2020, the company had owned half of the German airline.
«Sundair is now well established», Rossello told aeroTELEGRAPH, saying it would be unlikely that the airline would incorporate Air Berlin’s branding.
Once Germany’s second-largest airline, Air Berlin struggled for years to find its place in the market. The company had last registered a profit in 2012, due to the sale of its frequent flyer program to Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Airways.
Etihad was a major stakeholder in the airline from that same year, but as Air Berlin’s finances worsened, in August 2017 it pulled the plug in its support to the German airline. That was the mercy shot to Air Berlin, which declared bankruptcy shortly after.
