Originally Posted by
TravellingChris
Taiwan would be the smallest country to have airlines in all three major global alliances. The U.S. does, and P.R. China does as well, but those are massive markets both in terms of origin and destination traffic.
Even India doesn't have airline members in all three alliances, and its population and its traffic numbers are much larger than Taiwan's.
I think that population and O&D numbers aren't a particularly useful metric. A connecting hub serves a different value to an alliance than an O&D hub. India's proximity to the ME carriers and their hubs, and the nature of the Indian market more generally, are why they don't have three alliance members.
Note that for a while Spain had carriers in all 3 alliances, and it wasnt because it had more traffic than other European countries.