oneworld – be careful who you get into bed with!

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  • greyhawkgeoff
    Participant

    Is it me or is the oneworld just not careful who it gets into commercial bed with? With todays news it must be a certainty that Air Berlin will cease to exist shortly, dismembered to parts of the Lufthansa group and therefore Star. It joins past members of the oneworld alliance that have gone to the graveyard – Mexicana, Malev and Kingfisher to name just 3.

    Are there any other candidates out there?

    Are any other alliances this unlucky beyond losing members to mergers or takeovers e.g. Skyteam losing Continental to United?


    DavidGordon10
    Participant

    I don’t know about any other alliances being equally unlucky (or misguided) but it was certainly a pain for me when US Airways vanished into American.

    More seriously and more important, the biggest problem for me (not for an alliance, they don’t care) was when British Midland went belly-up. Certainly, I got a BA gold card but that was little use to me, what I needed was a Star Alliance gold card, and it took a few months to earn one. I appreciate that frequent flyers are an asset to be traded in these circumstances, but they are traded to the benefit of the airline, not the benefit of the passenger. To keep the frequent flyer happy, it would be much more positive for him or her to be allowed to designate the destination airline FF programme of choice: I would have much preferred SAS or LH to BA. Now it would be logical for me to be able to move from SAS to Swiss- but no chance.


    capetonianm
    Participant

    I always thought Skyteam was a collection of pretty insignificant and/or third rate airlines, with the exception of KLM, and I wonder (rhetorically) how they got into bed with such a bunch.

    The tragedy is that whenever I travel KLM, if I need to deal with anyone, other than in NL, I have to deal with AF or the AF mentality. Fortunately I have the numbers of a couple KLM call centres that are actually in NL and staffed by Dutch people.


    canucklad
    Participant

    To add to greyhawhgeoff’s list …… If I remember right Canadian was a One World member before being gobbled up BA style by the countries dominant carrier AC.

    And David’s point is spot on, I also suffered when BD went belly up, but then again I’ve never understood how giving me redemption points for free flights sometime in the future can define me as an asset…asset stripper maybe, but definitely not an asset !


    FDOS_UK
    Participant

    [quote quote=823075]To add to greyhawhgeoff’s list …… If I remember right Canadian was a One World member before being gobbled up BA style by the countries dominant carrier AC.

    And David’s point is spot on, I also suffered when BD went belly up, but then again I’ve never understood how giving me redemption points for free flights sometime in the future can define me as an asset…asset stripper maybe, but definitely not an asset !

    [/quote]

    I think David means an ‘asset’ in the sense that they will potentially bring decent revenue streams in the future, not as a balance sheet asset.

    In accounting terms, FF miles are a liability on the balance sheet, though there are different ways of accounting for them.

    If you are interested (or just suffering from insomnia) here is a thesis from a US student that might interest you

    http://greenandgold.uaa.alaska.edu/images/weekly/20120516-Accounting-for-Airline-FFP.pdf


    Bath_VIP
    Participant

    In addition aren’t Etihad now the kiss of death for an airline? Already Alitalia and Air Berlin are gone. Are there any others?


    DavidGordon10
    Participant

    That’s a bit hard on SkyTeam Capetonianm! I know AF is not everyone’s cup of tea, but they have been good for me and I have the Flying Blue platinum card to show for it – and SkyTeam includes such stars as Korean and Garuda, superb business class for the long haul out east. There are also plenty of other solid workmanlike airlines – Aeroflot, Aeroméxico, China Southern, Delta – who have given me good service in the last year or so.


    Londonfrog
    Participant

    Agreed, DavidGordon10. I was surprised by Aeroflot and thought that their services now exceed the ones provided by BA.


    DavidGordon10
    Participant

    Also, not too much lavish praise for KLM please (captonianm) – I am in Helsinki via Amsterdam, and I am told that my bag that failed to arrive is one of thousands delayed in the baggage system at AMS. Only when the agent learned that I was going to be here 5 days did she hint that it might be worth trying to get it delivered in Helsinki: if it had been just a day or two she was going to say “don’t bother”.


    IanFromHKG
    Participant

    In fairness, Kingfisher never actually joined oneworld!

    And much the same can in any case be said of the other alliances.

    Mexicana was Star Alliance until less than a year before its collapse. Ansett Australia went bust, so did VARIG. Star has also lost a lot of members to oneworld – BMI, TAM, US Airways, for instance (and Shanghai Airlines to Skyteam).

    SkyTeam isn’t immune either, with Alitalia version whichever-it-was having gone bust in January 2009, and again this year. SkyTeam also lost Continental to Star.

    On a sidenote, of course, there are all the airlines which have gone bust but continue to fly – the Big 3 American carriers (all of them, one per alliance, and several of their predecessors as well), JAL, and I am sure many others.

    So picking on oneworld doesn’t seem quite right, to me!

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