Foundation and early years The original
HAPAG company first became involved in the aviation industry in 1910, sponsoring
Zeppelin flights. in the original orange and blue livery that lasted for almost three decades. wearing its old livery, 2004. in its last livery, 2007. Hapag-Lloyd Flug was established in July 1972, two years after HAPAG merged with
Norddeutscher Lloyd, when the Hapag-Lloyd shipping group bought a few
Boeing 727s to fly its cruise passengers from
Germany to the ports of call for the cruises. It began operations on 30 March 1973. With the boom of the holiday charter flight market in the 1970s, it quickly adopted charter flights to popular holiday destinations in the
Mediterranean Sea area and the
Canary Islands as well and soon became one of the biggest German charter airlines. Throughout the years, the airline added regular passenger flights to its schedule, as well as new airplanes, such as the
Boeing 737-100 and
Airbus A310 aircraft. In 1979,
Bavaria Germanair, a charter air carrier operating
Airbus A300B4 and
British Aircraft Corporation BAC One-Eleven series 400 and 500 jets, was merged into Hapag-Lloyd Flug. In 1998, it became the first airline in the world to adopt the
Boeing 737-800.
Mergers and rebrandings Since 1997, it had been a subsidiary of
TUI AG, which also includes the
Hapag-Lloyd cargo container line and cruise line. When TUI released their new "big smile" logo in 2002, the Hapag-Lloyd livery that had remained unchanged for almost 30 years was completely changed to a new, light blue, white and red scheme with the new TUI logo on the tail to represent TUI's new corporate design. 2002 also saw the founding of
Hapag-Lloyd Express, a
low-cost airline that was to compete with the likes of
Ryanair. In November 2005, the airline changed its name to Hapagfly due to the new marketing strategy of the
TUI Group. In January 2007 in a restructuring, it combined its operations with
Hapag-Lloyd Express to become
TUIfly, for which it operated all flights, while Hapag-Lloyd Express marketed them until TUIfly got its own license. ==Destinations==