airberlin streamlines customer service

With the legal advice of the law firm Noerr, airberlin has streamlined its customer service and formed a joint venture, Luftfahrtservice Call Center GmbH, registered in Berlin, with the Austrian call center specialist Competence Call Center (CCC) which holds 80% in the joint venture, airberlin 20%. The new company takes over customer contact duties before and after the flight from airberlin. It is planned for the medium term that CCC will take over all customer service tasks completely and exclusively for airberlin.

All of the almost 200 customer service staff and service center staff of airberlin now work for the joint venture with CCC after the transfer of undertaking. It is planned that in the medium term they will be taken over by CCC alone. The employees initially continue to work in Berlin. The Federal Cartel Office has already approved the transaction. With the outsourcing project, airberlin streamlines its customer service and concentrates on its core business. For structuring the outsourcing, the second largest German airline relied on an inter-disciplinary Noerr team led by partners Dr. Hans-Christoph Schimmelpfennig, Dr. Thomas Lambrich (employment), Dr. Tobias Frevert (IT/outsourcing) and Dr. Christoph Spiering (corporate/M&A).

In the course of implementing the transaction, airberlin with Noerr defeated the application of the works council for an injunction prohibiting airberlin from disposing of the service center. Dr. Stefan Schwab, who argued against the application at the LAG Berlin-Brandenburg hearing: “It was very important that the  Landesarbeitsgericht (Regional Labour Court) rejected the unsustainable legal basis of the decision at first instance  – not only for our client airberlin. In the course of a transfer of undertaking, while information must be provided about a later reduction already planned by the acquirer, it remains that the disposal of the undertaking is not, as such, an operational change to prevent which the works council is entitled to an injunction. Adequate consultation in the course of the communication between all parties in advance of the transaction is absolutely crucial”.

Originally, airberlin intended to transfer the customer service and service center as of 1 October 2013 to the Bertelsmann subsidiary Arvato. This failed because ultimately agreement on certain conditions of the cooperation was not reached. At that time, airberlin was also advised by the Noerr outsourcing team led by Schimmelpfennig/Lambrich, Frevert and Spiering.

Noerr has many years’ experience and wide-ranging expertise in the aviation industry. airberlin regularly relies on the advice of the commercial law firm.

Advisor airberlin: Noerr LLP

Dr. Hans-Christoph Schimmelpfennig (employment – Munich), Dr. Tobias Frevert (IT outsourcing), Dr. Christoph Spiering (corporate/M&A), Dr. Thomas Lambrich (employment), Dr. Fabian Badtke (cartel law), Dr. Carsten Heinz (tax/structuring); Associates: Dr. Stefan Schwab (employment), Dr. Benjamin Bajon (IT outsourcing), Dr. Andrea Petsch (corporate/M&A – all Berlin).

Responsible contact partners airberlin: 

Michelle Johnson (corporate/ legal), Sebastian Hinüber, Christiane Schreff (legal department/ M&A), Tobias Kamsties (personnel)