After reading the interview Ed Sims , (former WS CEO), gave to Forbes, I feel much more confident in my prediction that WS will indeed lean towards just joining skyteam. I agree with all his points.
An excerpt from the interview:
As an industry expert, Sims believes most airlines are achieving these early predictions through significantly higher yields. As a customer in the Australasian market, he is not convinced that price hikes won't suppress demand.
"Airlines are really testing the boundaries of demand elasticity," he said. "My view is not that they are leveraging supply scarcity caused by labor or aircraft shortage, more that they have shareholders who are getting very restless over two to three years of major losses."
Leveraging global partnership beyond connectivity
The crisis of Covid-19 has re-emphasized the requirement for global alliances.
According to Sims, this is especially crucial for the current challenges of the industry's supply chain, which is widely dominated by duopolies— a trend that the pandemic may be reversing.
“Even if we look at sustainable aviation fuels, which is one of the biggest preoccupations that airlines currently have, it's dominated by a duopoly between Shell and Neste,” said Sims.
He argues there is opportunity for aviation alliances to move beyond mere global connectivity as "the means of creating globalization."
“[Duopolies] can be challenged by more powerful global partnerships, using critical mass to push back on the traditional view of geographical location,” he said.
Tight labor markets, skill shortages, and the desperate need for sustainability make the need for global partnerships and globalization an even greater imperative, he said.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlmoore/ ... -sims/amp/
It is definitely in WS’s best interests to keep going to global partnerships , if it wasn’t so expensive to be a part of a global alliance , they would have probably already done so a long time ago. The pandemic sure has created a whole new world.
Originally Posted by
PHXflier
KLM is making major cuts to its schedules (particularly intra-Europe) in order to help alleviate the incredibly long lines at Schiphol airport due to a lack of security and other personnel. I do not think that KLM is ready to offer anything new until they can fly a normal schedule again.
Yet the enhanced codeshare was announced just yesterday?
https://news.paxeditions.com/news/ai...-klm-codeshare