European leisure operator TUI is encouraged by better news on 737 Max deliveries from Boeing after a post-pandemic period marked by a frustrating lack of new metal.
“They are on a good path, in fairness,” TUI Group’s chief airline officer Marco Ciomperlik said during the Airlines 2025 event in London on 10 November. “In the past 12 months we have seen significant improvements… they have made real changes in the production line, which we really appreciate.”
Ciomperlik notes that TUI was the European launch customer for the 737 Max and had 15 of the type in its fleet when the global grounding began in 2019. In the post-Covid period it has added more to its fleet but has relied on wet-leased jets as Boeing deliveries lagged expectations, with some pushed back two to three years after the door-plug blow-out on an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 in early 2024.
“Boeing needed too long to understand the issues for themselves and needed too long to ramp up again,” he says of a challenging period for the airframer.
Crucial to TUI, he says, was the US Federal Aviation Administration’s recent decision to allow Boeing to up its output of the type to 42 aircraft per month, which means future deliveries should continue to schedule.
“This winter into almost the summer we are expecting up to 20 deliveries from Boeing,” he states of TUI, which counts 737-family narrowbodies and 787 widebodies in a group fleet of around 130 jets. “So it’s quite a significant bunch of aircraft coming, replacing old NGs and growing the overall volume as well.”
Acknowledging that there is still a shortage of aircraft around the world – and that Boeing is not alone in experiencing challenges – Ciomperlik’s hope is that deliveries are now on a firmly improving trend.
“We struggled in 2025 quite significantly,” he says of the challenges created by Boeing delays. But today, “we see that Boeing is far better set up”, he says, adding that as a 60-year customer of the Seattle airframer, “we came to good, collaborative agreements with them on how to deal with delays”.
