Marcos Rosselló, the founder and CEO of German charter airline Sundair, has acquired the Air Berlin brand from bankruptcy administrators for 120,910 euros. The German tour operator Schauinsland-Reisen has a 50% shareholding in Sundair and the indications are that the plan is to relaunch the airline.
For now, Rosselló is playing things down, having told aviation sector website aeroTELEGRAPH that "no decision has been made, but there are many ideas and everything is possible".
Nevertheless, tourism and travel sources in Germany are anticipating that there will be a relaunch and that this will mean more competition, more connectivity and the recovery of an "emblematic" airline in the history of German commercial aviation.
Air Berlin finally ceased operations six years ago. Mounting financial and competitive pressures led to the closure of its Palma hub, which had been established in 1995 and provided connections to various airports in Spain and Portugal. The number of routes dwindled to a mere two, Air Berlin having once been Palma's number-one airline in terms of flights because of all the routes it operated.
The airline came to be something of a symbol of Mallorca. Its huge billboard on the entrance road to the airport couldn't be missed and its all-year flights grew Germany as Mallorca's principal tourism market.