Marabu (DI, Tallinn Lennart Meri) will pause the growth it had planned at its bases at Cologne/Bonn and Stuttgart Manfred Rommel and will not place any additional aircraft at either of these airports, according to aeroTELEGRAPH quoting sources within the company.
The publication reported that the company had planned to place a third aircraft in Cologne and a fourth in Stuttgart, and while this is not going to happen now, the carrier will remain operating at both airports. However, it has dropped plans to open a new base at Leipzig/Halle during the 2025 high season.
Nonetheless, Marabu will place an additional A320-200N in Nuremberg at the start of the 2025 summer schedule, as it sees the city as a location with high demand. A spokesperson told aeroTELEGRAPH that the airline will offer flights to 16 holiday destinations around the Mediterranean next year and that the change in plans resulted from the lower availability of wet-leased aircraft and high costs and fees.
The ch-aviation schedules module shows Marabu flies from Cologne/Bonn to Fuerteventura, Tenerife Sur, and Hurghada and from Stuttgart to Fuerteventura, Tenerife Sur, Hurghada, Gran Canaria, and Lanzarote. It operates from Hamburg Helmut Schmidt and Nuremberg to these destinations in Spain and Egypt as well.
The Estonian carrier, sister to Germany’s Condor (DE, Frankfurt International), has a fleet of six in-house aircraft, all A320neo, plus two wet-leased A320-200s from Avion Express Malta and Heston Airlines. Marabu expects to add two more A320neo in the coming months. Earlier in 2024, Marabu’s chief executive, Axel Schefe, told ch-aviation that the plan after 2024 is to grow by four to five jets per year and each summer add between four and five aircraft on ACMI.
Marabu was not immediately available for comment.
