Originally Posted by
ijgordon
OW's Euro hubs are less useful for traveling within Europe, unless you are traveling to/from one of the hubs. Further, there are a lot of city-pairs in Europe where BA or IB doesn't even publish fares, such as FCO-AMS or ATH-WAW, making travel on the alliance much more costly and inconvenient vs. SkyTeam or *A.
My point exactly.
From the beginning, the global alliances were, and still are, Europe-centered marketing relationships. European legacy airlines were the prime movers in setting up global alliances, and each of the alliances has placed the establishment of TATL joint ventures as a top priority for the near term. The glaring weaknesses of oneworld's "periphery" approach are twofold: 1) the alliance has failed to secure members that can effectively cover Europe's eastern and southerneastern "periphery"; and 2) it leave the alliance wholly uncompetitive in targeting the growing traffic flows from much of the continent to points south (Africa) and east (Asia, except HKG/NRT) because the proposition of going out of the way to LHR or MAD (HEL is too small of a hub to make a difference either way) simply isn't attractive to flyers who can get better schedules from better-placed Star Alliance and SkyTeam hubs.