Special Edition Haribo Gummy Bear B737 Planes

I’m not much into junk food, but I do love me some Haribo Gummy Bears and anything Jelly Belly (sours currently). Well, you can imagine how excited I was back in August when I spotted the Haribo Gummy Bear plane while waiting to take off at Frankfurt. The B737-800 plane actually comes in two varieties – gold and blue, and both are operated by TUIfly.

Haribo, founder of the gummy bear, is a German company headquartered in Bonn. TUIfly is a low cost airline based at Hannover Airport in Langenhagen, Germany.

I don’t have any details on their marketing relationship, but from Wikipedia here are some TUIfly facts:

The airline was formed in 2007 by the merger of Hapag Lloyd Flug and Hapag Lloyd Express as a branch of TUI Travel. On 29 January 2008, plans were announced to merge TUIfly with Eurowings and Germanwings (the Lufthansa low-cost brands) into a joint and independent holding company, but were withdrawn as talks turned out to be unsuccessful.

TUI Travel confirmed on March 27, 2009 that it had sealed a strategic partnership with Air Berlin that would see Tui Travel take a 20% stake in Air Berlin, and Air Berlin 20% in TUIfly. Due to regulatory matters, this was changed to 9.9%.  Air Berlin also wet-leased 17 aircraft from TUIfly and took over all of TUIfly’s city connections. TUI focused on serving the charter market with 21 aircraft of the remaining fleet. From October 25, 2009, all German domestic flights previously operated by TUIfly were taken over by Air Berlin, as well as all flights to Austria, Italy and Croatia. Most of these flights are still operated by TUIfly aircraft, but are marketed by Air Berlin.

Interesting fact, CVS Gummy Bears are made by Haribo and a nice additional .99 item to add to your Vanilla Reload purchases, ensuring that they aren’t the exact same amounts each time!