Raffles

Its a lose-lose. Its great to have a decent *A mileage balance for trips to all of those places where BA never has seats (little places like Asia!). However, the M&M award chart is so stingy that even the most generous BMI miles balance won't get you far with Miles & More.

My current 300k balance is good for 6 First Class tickets to Hong Kong if I start in Zone 2, or 4 if I start in Zone 1, and go 'cash and miles'. That same 300k is good for LESS THAN TWO F tickets to HK using M&M!!

Assuming my 300k was turned into BA Miles, I might as well forget ever getting an F seat to HK. However, assuming I booked 350 days in advance, my miles would only be enough for ONE seat with only 60k left over! At best, using an Amex voucher, I'd only get 2 seats rather than 4 with BMI cash and miles.

Strawb

Let's not think about it...I have promised my folks free tickets to anywhere in the world they want to go and I have to keep that promise.

Capricorn

My most common destinations are Chicago and Frankfurt. So guess where my vote goes! BA's recent track record of support for operations from Manchester ain't too great.

Kevincm

Is now the time to mention the beardy one or not?

Then we have the other parts of BMI to be hived off unless the new owner really wants them...
BMI Regional ... FlyBe (unless Eastern Airways and co have serious spare cash)
BMI Baby ... EasyJet, Ryanair, TUiFly, Air Berlin or any other low cost carrier...

RAPC

I propose a different potential owner.

Dig deep everyone, it is time for a customer buy-out. Time for FTers to make an audacious bid don't you think?

There are plenty of financial, legal, marketing and aviation folks on the board with good experience. Should be a breeze. (Or maybe not)

Kevincm

Air FlyerTalk? "We don't just talk about airlines: We run an airline"

Does that mean we have Pam Ann as our princple CSD? (those who have seen the Pam Ann DVD will understand this line)

Would have to be one heck of a mega issue to raise the capital. I belive the Beardy one once said "To become a millonare, you start as a Billionare ... and start up an airline..."

That or do you really want a ERJ-145 named after you RAPC?

RAPC

I'm a simple man with no ego. An ERJ-135 will be fine.

bazzatel

If BA were to aquire BMI would it not be required to yield some (all?) of it's LHR domestic routes - and slots - to a competitor eg. AFKL, thus defeating the whole point of aquiring them in the first place?

Regarding LH's holding, would they perhaps do a swapsy with BA's holding of IB (not sure how like-for-like that would be in financial terms). LH would love to get their hands on at least part of Iberia - perhaps a more attractive prosposition to them than BMI, even with it's abundance of LHR slots (LH already has quite a slot portfolio at LHR already).

At the Investor Day today BA seemed lukewarm about Iberia at best. WW explained that they have 3 options for serving South America, which they siad was one of their major growth markets: serve with their own metal, serve via transat on AA metal and via MAD. The third seemed to be the least desirable as they lose out on the higher revenues of flying pax across the Atalntic to codesharie with AA to SA. I think BA's holding of IB is a major trump card they will be willing to play to increase their presence at LHR.

Kevincm

Ah. You're after an A330 then. Form a queue. We'll name them for all the BMI supporterrs out there (so thats all 3 named then).

On a more serious note, if there was investment from a third party (be it BA or LH, BeardyAir, etc), then the long haul fleet needs urgent ajustment (and stopping the silly service cuts - more in the trip report when i get home to post it).

Oxon Flyer

But only G-RAPC has a ready-made handle.

DClass4Me

Nobody thanks very much; all the others are rubbish. We are all very lucky boys and girls who should stop talking about it immediately so as not to tempt fate. Mods please close

NoY

As Raffles points out it's a lose-lose situation with virtually whatever programme DC morphs into

Clearly, one of the big issues is where you fly.

1. The BA option appears to be pretty damn good if you fly to USA/North American destinations (and some other destinations) for 25k miles WT+/CW MFU. Nice, and pretty good availability.
2. But if, like me, most of your redemption travel is to S.E. Asia, particularly BKK/HKT/SIN etc. then just try finding MFU availbility, say, CW LHR-BKK -I have never managed to do this! HKG is a little better, but then one has to get to BKK/SIN/HKT...ideally on a redemption..
3. Ditto VS to HKG....
4. My strategy has been to burn as many DC F/J miles as I can this year and in parallel build up hundreds of thousands of miles with BA & VS (beacause I can) and hope it's one of them! I cannot readily do this with M&M. So if it's LH I am kind of scr**ed!

On balance though, I suppose I would vote for....BA...just because they have a better network than VS..

RAPC

It doesn't appear to have a plane registered. Would anyone care to purchase a plane and register it thus please? I'll happily attend to break the bottle of champagne for the maiden voyage.

LiviLion

You can see the benefit to BA if they got bmi.

They could immediately stop all the bmi flights in and out of LHR that are serviced by bmi and BA.

To ensure that passenger numbers remained the same they could use a bigger plane to get the same number of people on the merged flights (a use for the 757's) and hey presto, lots of new slots for long haul flights out of LHR.

The only problem would be bmi regional as I doubt BA would want that.

Not sure if I have a preference over who buys bmi although I would prefer it to stay as it is if possible.

neilcorbett

The reason I asked the question was that I wouldn't happily swap DC for either of BA or LH... and now its been mentioned VS could be added to that list too. It seems that most people feel the same way...

SMB - don't sell!!