Originally Posted by
stimpy
It would have been MUCH worse had they done nothing.
Then that sounds pretty worrying about the future. If AF have been the cunning and cynical selves that you describe and managed to pull a fast one on BA and LH with that hypothetical strategy of claiming to work on a partnership whilst effectively only wanting feeder traffic from Europe's fourth largest traffic base, and as a result, are still well worse off financially than the two major competitors that they supposedly strategically defeated, I fear the worst now that this fat cow period is coming to an end.
That said, if for the sake of argument we accept your narrative at face value, the slightly odd part of the demonstration is that at no point do you relate those claimed gains to the actual cost of the operation. As a reminder, for this to be a success, then presumably the benefits must have outweighed the cost, which also means that the added profit strictly related to the AZ increased traffic must have been well north of €100 million/year given the overall investment.