Originally Posted by
the810
Isn't ITA and LHG shooting itself in the foot a little? This should mean that Volare members will lose their status benefits at other SkyTeam carriers before they get Star Alliance benefits. That creates a rather long limbo when the programme will only be useful on ITA, LHG and nothing else, creating an incentive for the members to flock elsewhere.
LHG clearly want AZ flyers to fly on LH, LX, OS and SN ahead of AF, KL, SK and UX.
If there are AZ flyers that will "flock elsewhere" because they don't want to fly LH, LX, OS and SN and apparently also don't want to fly AZ anymore, but want to stick with Skyteam airlines, I'm not sure how having immediate Star Alliance benefits would help change their minds. If such flyers simply i) don't want to fly on AZ anymore and ii) don't want to fly on LH, LX, OS & SN - where their status is/will soon be acknowledged - then giving them immediate Star Alliance status is seemingly not going to win them over. Their status is observed, or will soon be observed, on AZ, LH, LX, OS and SN, so the addition of Star Alliance status would only matter to customers if/when they ventured further afield on to other Star Alliance carriers - the Uniteds, Air Canadas, Turkish Airlines, Aegeans, Air Chinas, etc. Why would this be the decisive factor in sticking with AZ/3A for those people who i) don't want to fly AZ anymore and ii) don't want to fly on LH, LX, OS & SN?
LHG knows that they will indeed "lose" some customers who, for whatever reason, prefer to stick with Skyteam. So it probably makes sense to get rid of/drive away those customers ASAP and not have to pay to continue to placate these customers, allowing them to enjoy Skyteam and draining revenue off to AFKL and the likes, while knowing that these customers will never actually stay with AZ whenever they finally got around to actually cutting that Skyteam cord.
And besides, LHG has waited a very, very long time just to get to this point....so AZ has probably, in their opinion, already been "wasting" money on/in Skyteam for far longer than they actually wanted.
(And ITA Airways were never whole-heartedly in Skyteam, despite being a "full member"; SK and AZ never opened reciprocal earning/burning/recognition, and I'm pretty sure that not all of the other Skyteam members have got around to making AZ a partner, and vice versa. If you look at the Volare Air Partners' page, only 10 (of the 18 remaining) Skyteam members were actually recognised; China Airlines, China Eastern, Garuda, Kenya Airways, SAS, Tarom, Vietnam Airlines and Xiamen Airlines are not, and never were, partners on which AZ flyers could earn miles)