It’s always fun to come up with contractions of names for airlines that merge.  My newest is Britberia Airlines, British Airways and Iberia Airlines.  Good news for those two:  they now have shareholder approval of their merger and expect to conclude the deal in January.  The new entity will be called International Airlines Group and it will manage both the British Airways and Iberia brands.  I wonder if someone at AA didn’t help with the new name as that is about as bland as one can get.

Willie Walsh, who will serve as over-arching chairman of this new group, says it’s been a good year for British Airways with this merger and their recent anti-trust approval to work with American Airlines.   While it may not have been their worst year, I don’t think it’s a “good” year.  They’ve still got a fight going on with their cabin crew union that really needs to get solved.

The new group still falls behind Lufthansa and AirFrance/KLM but it does make BA/IB a better player against those two but with a weakness or two as well:  They’re still dependent on a growth constrained hub at Heathrow airport and their ability to expand will lay with the Iberia hub in Madrid.  The other two SuperAirlines have got hubs in better places for more of Europe’s traffic.  Hubs in places like Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Berlin and Zurich.  They’re just more centrally located.

Walsh says future growth will be focused in Madrid but I don’t see how that helps BA in its home territory of the UK.  How is it more attractive to take a flight from Manchester to Madrid to go overseas to many places?  I think this union needs a northern European partner and I think they’ll seek one out once this merger is fully ironed out.  If not a European partner, then a different Ireland/UK hub is probably needed. 

Madrid and Spain seem logical for connections to Africa, South America and perhaps the middle East or even India.  The UK is a logical connection point for destinations within the UK, northern Europe and North America.  But growth is needed in the UK and Heathrow can’t continue to be the hub for all things BA.

Perhaps the Irish government will sell Aer Lingus to the group.  Dublin could be a nice gateway city for trans-atlantic flights and connections to airports throughout Ireland and the UK.

Filed under: Airline News by ajax