Originally Posted by kiwiandrew

Part of the problem in weighing up the merits of the various alliances is that each person has different priorities in terms of what is important to them in coverage , nonetheless , I am always amused to see OW trumpet their coverage of Australia , a continent with a population of approx 20 million , and gloss over their lack of coverage of the worlds most populous continent , Asia , with a population of nearly 4 billion . I dont really believe that by having Australian coverage 'limited' to BNE/ADL/SYD/MEL/PER/CNS that *A is at a huge disadvantage - all the major business centres and centres of population are served via SIN and/or AKL . Yes , it would be nice to have NTL/HBA/CBR etc also on the *A map , and the ability to include Aussie domestic sectors would also be useful but for most purposes *A does serve Australia .

To me the biggest handicap oneworld seems to have is its inability to take Asia seriously , at the moment they have only two Asian hubs , both on the Eastern periphery of the continent , and they seem quite likely to lose one of those . Two hubs to connect to a vast continent of nearly 4 billion people !

The other big handicap OW faces is the lack of a centrally located European hub forcing pax bound for most of Europe from pretty much anywhere other than the Americas to overfly their intended destination and then backtrack . Both of these deficiencies seem far more serious to me than the deficiency *A and Skyteam suffer from in terms of lack of Australian domestic coverage .

I would love to see OW make a concerted effort to lure in MH who seem to be constantly spurned by Skyteam . A multihub strategy of KUL/HKG/NRT ( assuming that OW can hang on to JL) seems a good start for improving OW Asian coverage . If Kingfisher survive the next year or so they would probably be a good addition too ... they are already on the Global Explorer fare and that is often a precursor to OW membership .

It is all very well for OW to trumpet their 'quality over quantity' message ( with IB in the alliance ? please !! ) but the point remains that they serve only around 70% of the cities that *A serves , and if your business requires you to regularly visit those cities which are missing from the OW map , or to do multi-city itineraries in Asia then OW is never going to get your business .