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, Marabu plans to base three planes at Leipzig/Halle during the 2025 high season, it told ch-aviation.

Nonetheless, Marabu will place an additional A320-200N at 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.

In a statement shared with ch-aviation, Marabu said: "Due to the limited availability of aircraft and high demand for air travel in other European countries outside Germany, the availability of ACMI is more limited than expected in the original planning, which has an impact on the implementation of the original flight schedule."

Simultaneously, it added, airport infrastructure costs and air traffic control charges in Germany are rising significantly from a cost level that is already among the highest in Europe. "Under these circumstances, and in line with the decisions of other airlines such as Ryanair, Eurowings, and Condor, Marabu has also had to adjust its flight schedule for the coming summer", it explained.

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, affiliated with Germany’s Condor (DE, Frankfurt International), has a fleet of seven in-house aircraft, all A320neo, plus two wet-leased A320-200s from Avion Express Malta and Heston Airlines. Marabu expects to add one more A320neo next month. Earlier in 2024, its 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.