Will the BA / AA joint venture be broken up if Virgin goes bust?
 

Had to trim the headline slightly

https://www.headforpoints.com/2020/0...enture-ending/

Well worth a read

I do take the speculation articles on HfP with a pinch of salt. The best feature of the site is to provide a summary of the latest points news for people who don't have the time or the willingness to keep up to date via sites like this, but with the lack of interesting points news the quality of their content has gone down (what's the point of a daily chat thread when forums like this do it better?)

I'd have thought a points blog would have picked up the news on this forum that it's now possible to do RFS redemptions in Y on the LHR-JFK route, it'll probably appear in a few days!

OK, I'm a little bitter that HfP decided to make the JavaScript workaround for refunds as a sticky on their site for weeks. If a relatively small number of people on sites like this knew about it BA would have probably left it alone but the prominence of the HfP article made it appear high in Google results for BA refunds at the time and meant BA had the incentive to work on blocking the workaround.

Paging Raffles...

I should actually give my view on why BA is not openly campaigning for VS demise - because BA may need state assistance in future and it would look bad to the public if they willingly were wishing their competitors to go under.
Back when Flybe was struggling nobody expected things would get so bad that all airlines were at risk and so it was fair enough to say that one loss making airline doesn't deserve special treatment (and when Flybe collapsed Loganair and Eastern started to quickly fill the gaps until covid-19 really took hold).
So I think from a business perspective BA would be happy losing competition with VS and DY. They may have to quit their joint venture with AA at some point which means they'd compete once again with AA but that doesn't mean they leave oneworld and doesn't stop them codesharing on connections. If someone books BA to the US and then connects on an AA flight, it's still better for AA than if someone flies VS to the US and connects with DL. Same if someone flies AA to Europe and then BA onwards.

BA and Virgin should merge. Rename the airline Willy & Dick Airways. The lviery could be more phallic If you re-painired the front of the plane like a penis head (work it out). In doing so this would also give a whole new interpretation to the area of the aircraft better known as Cockpit. Then if ever in the future the airline failed, the headlines in the Sun would be "What a Cockup"

Probably get my knuckles wrapped by the mods for this but having jusr come off a 2 hr pointless Skype call needed a little chuckle. I'll get me coat............
ML

would the aircrafts still be named with female names? And carrying any flag?

I believe that is a key requirement when reading 'speculation', wherever it may be.

Have we mentioned BA Refund Helper in an article? No, so stop complaining :-) Do also please note that I am currently paying the full salaries, no furloughs, of 3 people whilst not paying myself, on income which is running 80% below usual.

We couldn't do the JFK thing today because we'd already pre-published 2/3rd of the Wednesday content early, during Tuesday, which left us slot-constrained today! Will probably run it tomorrow.

Early warning that there is an outstanding deal being launched tomorrow (subject to final confirmation) which I can't cover first thing but will drop in during the day. It will also cause much gnashing of teeth though.

Any particular time we should be looking out for this?

Perhaps I've been somewhat harsh, and indeed it's good you can keep everyone on the payroll. It's just I've always rated HFP much higher than the likes of God Save the Points that have always been about clickbait or getting freebies off airlines (at least I know HFP won't say 'Alex Cruz is Awesome' just to get invited to events).
Let's hope when things start returning to normal BA will have some interesting offers to make HFP my first read in the morning once again.

It's just been pulled due to the fall out from the redundancies. Need to wait 1-2 weeks I'm afraid.

If Virgin survives as a much smaller airline and BA/AA survives as a JV that’s much bigger than Virgin, does the JV have to be altered/ broken up?

Hopefully you saved some of that monstrous salary you told us all about about a couple of weeks ago :D

To paraphrase, the easiest way to be a multi-millionaire travel blogger is to work in the City for 17 years before you start doing it :-)

Deleted.

I think we forget just how small a player VS are (5.5m passengers per annum if I recall)

Great PR department, however...