Shai,

I wholeheartedly agree with you that EL AL indeed has great potential. I have written extensively on other threads in this forum over the past several months what precisely needs to be done to unleash EL AL's potential and turn it into the great airline I know it can become.

In my opinion, the two greatest inhibiting factors preventing EL AL's success as a commercial enterprise has been its corporate culture AND old employee/union contracts. It's corporate culture never changed from a bloated and heavily unionized/regulated state owned enterprise one to an efficient and lean private one able to compete in the open marketplace. In the business plan I submitted to the EL AL board and to the Borovich family I devoted a section to this topic and eventually Izzy Borovich came around and went on record agreeing that EL AL's corporate culture needs to change. I wrote about that on another thread in this forum and provided a link to the article. I have extensive experience in the business and legal realms in Mainland China and EL AL's current state of affairs is similar to privatized former Chinese state owned enterprises. Like EL AL, they kept their managerial structures and cultures in place long after privatization with the exact same results; namely unprofitability and an inability to compete in the open marketplace. The main difference, however, between EL AL and a former Chinese state owned enterprise gone private is that EL AL will likely NOT receive any funding from the Israeli government to keep it afloat whereas the Chinese companies are fed a steady diet of 'loans' from the Bank of China which they never end up repaying.

Turing to the labor/union contracts, they are the likely reason why EL AL operates such a large call center and refuses to gear customers towards internet bookings like just about every other airline does; certainly ones which compete with EL AL on key routes. Unless and until those contracts are abrogated and/or modified extensively, EL AL will continue to falter amid its unsustainable operational plan, financial losses and greater erosion of marketshare. Basically, the old corporate culture and labor contracts have a symbiotic relationship at EL AL; they feed one another, the contracts enable those who perpetuate the old culture to remain and both the culture and contracts are used to hinder the airline's adaptation to the marketplace.

However, at the same time, those contracts have no way of being abrogated if management remains bloated with people held over from the state owned era who line their pockets while expecting front line staff to make all the sacrifices. Hence, the management and employees have Balkanized themselves with each taking a zero sum game approach. This is no way for a company to operate.

The above is precisely why I no longer blame Shkedy for this entire mess. The mess is structural and Shkedy, in my opinion, has not been empowered to change it.