Tuifly is making substantial cuts in Germany. The airline subsidiary of the travel group is closing down several locations, cutting the targeted fleet size in half and reducing the number of jobs. Talks between the company and employee representatives will show exactly how many jobs will be cut. However, according to the news agency Reuters on Monday (June, 8), Tui group CEO Friedrich Joussen said: «We are talking about 900 full-time positions.»
The German Pilot's union strongly criticizes this. «The Tui group must not misuse Corona state aid to reduce collectively agreed personnel in Germany,» Vereinigung Cockpit said. In April, the company had received a loan of 1.8 billion euros from the state development bank KFW. Currently there are reports of further financial needs.
Cuts so far only for German Tuifly
The pilot's union suspects that the German airline Tuifly will have to buy additional capacity in winter 2020/21 and summer 2021, including abroad, if the booking situation is good. «The group must not misuse the state aid, which is intended as a short-term bridging of the current shortfalls, to shift jobs abroad in the long term.»
Tuifly employees also criticise the fact that the cutbacks are only taking place in Germany: «The other Tui airlines do not see themselves confronted with such massive job cuts - although Great Britain, for example, is suffering much more from the effects of Corona», says one affected person.
Tui refers to other market conditions...
Tui also has airline subsidiaries in Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Sweden. There are no known plans to cut back on these airlines. «In the other countries, different market conditions prevail», says a Tui aviation spokesperson.
In Great Britain, for example, there is still an undersupply after the bankruptcies of Monarch Airlines (2017) and Thomas Cook (2019). «Before the Corona crisis, we had actually planned to lease additional aircraft in the double-digit range for the summer.»
In addition, the fleets are structured differently, Tui argues. «In the other countries, Tuifly has winter fleets and in the summer they lease planes,» the spokesman says. «In Germany it's the other way round: we have a summer fleet and in winter we actually always lease around ten planes to Canada.» There they fly for the Tui subsidiary Sunwing Airlines.
