2017-10-27: Good-bye, Air Berlin!
As I am writing this, two flights that should have left almost an hour ago, at 21:35, are boarding at Munich Airport: flight AB 6048 to Düsseldorf and flight AB 6102 to Berlin-Tegel.
The latter is billed as Air Berlin’s final commercial flight under its own airline code – because of its scheduled arrival is five minutes later than that of the former.
It marks the end of an era: the end of the only credible competitor to the Lufthansa group in the domestic air travel market in Germany. From now on, it’s Lufthansa, or its low-cost offspring Eurowings, or quite literally the highway (or the train). The administrator is still negotiating with Easyjet, but I am not optimistic anything positive will come out of it.
Air Berlin used to be my favourite airline. It got suckier and suckier over the years, but with Gold status it was still bearable. I could see how well their attempts to squeeze out extra cash worked: On any Air Berlin flight I was on recently, all (or almost all) of the “Business Class” seats remained empty, and the XXL seats were empty or occupied by people like myself that didn’t have to pay extra for them. Desperate measures rarely work and often backfire. This was no exception. Air Berlin’s reputation was going downhill really fast.
Good-bye, Air Berlin! Your former self will be missed. Your recent self, not so much, but still.
Update: AB 6210, the “last flight”, has departed, while AB 6048 is still boarding. Maybe their roles will be reversed.
