23 September 2019 will go down in history as a black day for the tourist industry. Thomas Cook, the oldest travel company in the world, can no longer pay the bills and goes bankrupt. 21,000 employees are anxiously waiting to see what would happen to them. However, not every branch of the British organisation has gone down!
A few months ago, speculation began that Condor wanted to break away from the entire organisation and then function as a fully-fledged airline in its own right. This seems to be happening now. Shortly after the disappearance of Thomas Cook, the company threatened to fall, but the German government came up with a bridging loan of no less than 380 million euros. In this way, the company can look for new investors.
Fortunately, Condor doesn’t have to look too far for new investors. Several tour operators have already indicated that they are interested in investing or working together. This is a nice bonus, because Thomas Cook collapsed, resulting in a 15 percent drop in the supply of passengers.
Surprisingly, this is not the only good news. A few days ago, Condor announced its annual figures. The airline welcomed 9.4 million passengers, which corresponds to a 4.5 percent increase compared to a year earlier. The occupancy rate also remained spectacularly high and amounted to no less than 90 percent. Not only did the number of customers increase, both literally and figuratively, but turnover also increased by 6 percent to 1.7 billion euros.
So the future looks bright. This is therefore also the right time to expand the network considerably. Frankfurt will be connected to Edmonton, Tobago, New Orleans and Barbados. The last 3 have been carried out before and are now back in business. It is also striking that there is again long-haul activity at Munich airport. Condor will fly its Boeing 767-300ERs from the German city to Seattle, Punta Cana, Cancun and Halifax next summer. There are also additions to the European network. For example, there will be flights from several German cities to Paphos in Cyprus.
In addition to changes in the network, there will also be changes on the aircraft from now on. You can see that a Boeing 767-300ER no longer flies around with the ‘golden heart’ on its tail. This has been replaced by the old logo, namely a bird.
Besides Conor, Thomas Cook’s Scandinavian sister, Thomas Cook Airlines Scandinavia, has also made a restart. This will now continue under the name Sunclass Airlines!
