Originally Posted by
stargold
Take heed from the lessons learnt during the collapse of Ansett Australian - most people with reward tickets issued by AN were basically SOL and had to get back home on their own expense, except for a few cases of the operating airlines honouring the ticket out of goodwill gesture.
If - and it would seem to be a rather academic discussion at the moment - the issuing carrier goes bust, then you are entirely reliant on the goodwill of the operating airline and/or travel insurance to get you there and back.
BD's current situation in no way mirrors AN.
AN was a much larger carrier than BD with much larger debts and with a shareholder (NZ) who was ironically significantly smaller than it was so was unable to access any funds from it's owner. As it was, NZ was milliseconds from death and it was only due to the NZ government bailout that NZ survived and even today it remains largely in public hands. NZ overextended itself a few years prior by purchasing the 50% of AN it did not own sowing the seeds of both its demise as well as AN's death.
AN also had the 'Noah's Ark' of fleets with almost an aircraft from every manufacturer costing the carrier massive amounts of cash to maintain, not to mention poor union agreements and overall poorly managed. They also stupidly sold the bits of the company only just before it's death which potentially could have helped it's rescue (namely that it was one of the world's largest aircraft lessors - AWAS) longer term.
Whilst BD has problems, it is in no way in the same state as AN when it collapsed. Most importantly it has shareholders who when push comes to shove can pay to prop up the business, and most importantly it has some 14% of all LHR slots. Even SMB can add in cash into the business should he choose to do so although let's be honest, all the current talk is about LH trying to push SMB into pushing an extra £100m into the transaction.
If LH were really worried about cash, they would not have taken on OS and SN who really are in a poor state. LH just want value for money which they probably are not getting with the current valuation of BD.
