Unister

» see unister.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Unister was started in Leipzig in 2002 by Thomas Wagner, who was a business student at the time and twenty-four years old. The first thing it ran was a site where students swapped course notes. By 2010 the group owned somewhere north of forty websites and the names tell you the strategy without any further explanation: fluege.de, reisen.de, billigfluege.de, hotelreservierung.de, auto.de, kredit.de, geld.de, versicherungen.de, partnersuche.de, webmail.de. Buy the German word for the thing, then buy traffic for less than the comparison engine behind it earns.

At its height the group was mediating close to two billion euros of package holidays and flights a year, which made it the clear market leader in German online travel, ahead of TUI and well ahead of Expedia locally. Public figures put it at more than ten million unique users a month. Staff numbers peaked somewhere near two thousand and were down around eleven hundred by the end. Michael Ballack and Reiner Calmund fronted the television campaigns.

The revenue figures are where the record falls apart, and that should be said plainly. German Wikipedia's 307 million euros for 2011 is cited to a homepage rather than a document, its 227 million for 2010 is cited to nothing, and the larger numbers circulating online trace back to a dead blog about celebrity wealth. The booking volume is the number that holds up, and in a travel agency the booking volume was never the company's money anyway.

~ the case file ~

~ the arbitrage ~

Until 2011 a large share of Unister's profit came from a trade that any engineer will recognize instantly and that was never going to last. You buy Google ads pointing at a page of your own, and that page carries Google ads of its own, and the second number is larger than the first. It works as long as the auction is sloppy and the content in between is cheap enough to be effectively free. Google banned the practice in 2011, which removed the engine from the car.

None of this ever reached me, for a dull reason rather than a geographic one. These were German-language domains selling German package holidays under German travel law, and the arbitrage underneath them only pays if you own the search results in that language. The identical trade ran on Turkish keywords at the identical moment, owned by other people entirely, which is why the model crossed borders freely and the domains never did at all.

~ the checkbox ~

What replaced the arbitrage money was a series of things bolted onto the booking flow, and German consumer courts spent four years taking them off again. In July 2012 the Oberlandesgericht Dresden banned fluege.de from displaying a consumer-protection seal that consumers would reasonably mistake for an independent testing body, on pain of a 250,000 euro penalty. In March 2013 the Landgericht Leipzig banned the site from advertising incomplete flight prices, after customers discovered a 34 euro credit card fee at the fifth step of the booking with no other payment method offered, and ordered 20,000 euros of skimmed profit paid over to the federal justice office. An earlier fine of 75,000 euros was already on the record.

The best-documented one is from 20 October 2015. When a customer clicked "no" on the rebooking service, a red bubble appeared reading "Achtung, nicht empfehlenswert". When they declined the travel protection, a second one read "Volles Risiko ohne Reiseschutz!". The court held that the warning about cancellation costs reaching a hundred percent of the fare was simply untrue, since taxes and airport fees are refunded in any case. Meanwhile prosecutors had raided the Leipzig headquarters in December 2012 over roughly a million euros of unpaid insurance tax on a product called Stornoschutz, and TUI canceled its agency contract with Unister eight days later.

~ the venice trip ~

On 13 July 2016 Wagner flew out of Hof-Plauen in a single-engine Piper, via Innsbruck to Venice, to raise money. The company needed it badly: geld.de had been sold that May, and a 55 million euro loan from its largest creditor had fallen due with only 20 million available to repay it. What the trip was actually for is the part that remains partly unestablished a decade later. Italian police confirmed that Wagner had filed a criminal complaint in Venice before the return flight, saying he had been defrauded of large sums. A Slovenian police spokesman said a copy of that complaint was found at the crash site, along with ten thousand Swiss francs. The widely repeated detail, that he had handed over roughly a million euros in cash for a larger loan paid back in counterfeit francs, is attributed to insiders and the amount varies by outlet.

The aircraft came down near Ajdovščina in Slovenia on 14 July with four people aboard and no survivors. Wagner was thirty-eight. In October 2016 the Slovenian authority reported indications of possible interference with the elevator, and that is the version that stuck in most people's heads. The final report, four years later, found instead that the pilot had left the planned route into a bad-weather front. Ice formed on a horizontal stabilizer the aircraft was never certified to fly into, and the part probably fluttered and broke away.

Unister Holding filed on 17 July, the administrator announced the preliminary proceedings on the 18th, and the court formally opened them on 16 September. Tagesschau put the relationship between the crash and the filing precisely: the crash was not the cause of the insolvency, it was the trigger. Urlaubstours filed the next day and twelve more subsidiaries followed within the fortnight. A financial broker who arranged the Venice meeting was convicted of fraud at the Landgericht Leipzig in March 2017 and sentenced to three years and ten months. By December 2021 prosecutors had closed files on nineteen former managing directors across twenty-six group companies, mostly for delayed filing.

~ the parts that lived ~

Rockaway Capital of Prague agreed to buy the travel brands on 23 December 2016, with closing early the following year, taking about 520 remaining staff. The price was never disclosed and the 75 to 80 million euro figure that circulates has no source behind it. The German business became Invia Travel Germany, and in December 2024 the Polish group Wirtualna Polska agreed to buy all of Invia for close to 240 million euros.

fluege.de serves 35 kilobytes today and will sell you a flight. ab-in-den-urlaub.de is operated from Dittrichring in Leipzig by a company registered at the same local court that opened the insolvency. unister.de resolves to a server that answers with 124 bytes of dark red bold Arial reading "Sorry, no Host found". That server is the one piece of the estate nobody bid for.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »