What does oneworld lack compared to Star and SkyTeam? And what does it do better?
 

I just recently became oneworld sapphire (through BA Silver), after being Star Gold for a long time (thru SQ PPS).

Have been travelling oneworld quite a fair bit lately now. A few things have pleasantly surprised me about ow -- the chief thing being ability to use any oneworld airport lounge as a ow sapphire even when flying economy, as long as I on flying a ow carrier. Can even use AA ACs for domestic US flights as a BA ow sapphire! Amazing perk!

Being SQ PPS allows me to use SQ lounges only when flying economy, and that too only when flying SQ. Other than that, Star's lounge access seems similar to oneworlds for elite members

I also like many of the oneworld airlines -- have some good airlines there in BA, CX, JL, QF, and arguably the most premium US airlines, AA. A more "exclusive" club than Star, though Star has its stars -- SQ being exhibit #1!

What do I not like about oneworld -- well, the most obvious thing is the lack of mileage earn / burn when across the Atlantic on AA when flying BA and vice-versa. A huge gap, which I am hoping they fix fast!

What are your thoughts on advantages and disadvantages of oneworld relative to the other alliances? Going forward, if you had to stick to one (may be hard for me to retain status on both ow and star), which one would you pick?

sorry , couldnt get the quote function to work ... but you said ...

"Star Gold does not offer any lounge access benefits (AFAIK) to its members."



http://www.staralliance.com/en/trave...er_status.html

..Airport Lounge Access - available worldwide for you and a friend when you travel with any Star Alliance member airline, regardless of your class of travel. ...


I know this is sort of OT since you were asking about OW , but in order to make comparisons you need to know what you were entitled to at Star ... and it appears that you didnt know

Incorrect. All designated *G lounges are available when flying *A, no matter the class of travel. SQ at SIN has special *G lounges that are separate to their business class lounges, and you can use these flying any *A airline in economy.

The lounge access benefits for *A and OW status are fairly similar (OW Emerald has access to F lounges, but outside a few hubs there are not many of these).

Apologies, you are both correct. I think what confused me is my primary Star airline, SQ, started limiting access to its lounges to those flying SQ only, not other Star airlines.

After then achieving Sapphire via BA, I was impressed I had access to AA's Admiral Clubs in the US even when flying AA domestically. Guess that made me get the perception ow's lounge policies were better.

I will correct my original post to remove my erroneous comment.

Thanks,
Sankaps.

without having any idea of what your expected travel patterns are it is hard to say whose network will suit you best as each alliance has different geographical strengths and weakspots .

If you do a lot of RTWs then OW has a huge difference in that their RTW is not mileage based , this means that you can construct some incredible itineraries to max out the miles earned for an RTW .

You can get some idea of the different global reach of the alliances here.

Now that RTWs are limited to 16 segments, there is not so much of an advantage to Oneworld's xONEx RTW. Yes can fly more than *A RTW but the difference is now much smaller and may be negated by more back-tracking to get to where you want to go.

So say we all - keep fingers and toes crossed for this year.

Otherwise, the big gap is Africa coverage, where *A beats the bejeezus out of OW.

OTOH OW's South America coverage runs rings around *A, ditto Australia.

I think the main advantage of OW (from the passenger perspective) is the greater consistency of the products. I have the impression that OW is quite demanding when admitting new members. Also recent additions like RJ are not much behind their legacy members (some in this forum even argue they are better).

In *A the large number of additions in the last years has compromised the service consistency quite a bit. Some member *A airlines still do not offer a decent website in English (e.g. FM, AI), others are sub-standard in some products (e.g. long-haul C on MS). Obviously the other side of the coin is the number of destinations/routes added by this new members.

The other potential disadvantage oneworld may have, assuming AA and BA can finally get their act together / get government approval to extend their alliance across the Atlantic, is ease of connections at LHR. Does anyone know if AA and BA (and Qantas and CX and Iberia and other ow carriers for that matter) plan to co-locate at T5? If not, connections will be quite a bit more painful relative to UA-LH at FRA, DL-AF at CDG, and NW-KL at AMS.

Would be ironic given that the other alliances are co-locating at Heathrow (eg SkyTeam at T4, Star at T3?) and oneworld carriers do not have the same benefit! Perhaps LHR needs to build some airside hi-speed train links to facilitate inter-terminal connections, like they have at KUL, FRA, SIN, HKG and other such places.

The OW plan for LHR is for all members to be in T3 and T5. BA will be the ONLY carrier in T5 and will only have a small presence in T3. All other carriers will have all of their service in T3. Almost all of the moves have been completed save for Qantas/BA flights to SE Asia/Oz. After the moves are complete, we are told that fine tuning of the transfers system will result in shorter minimum-connecting times between T3 and T5. It remains to be seen how much improvement they will make in this regard and as far as I know, the only airside connection option will be the same herky-jerky bus we all use now. Anybody know if there are plans to eventually replace the buses with some kind of airside people mover or tram between T3 and T5?

Latest on all this here:
http://www.oneworld.com/ow/airports-...ondon-heathrow

deleted

A notable advantage of *A over OW is alliance UG awards. Yes, there are limititations, and not available using UA miles (other than the spearate LH UG), but still much better than no UG option at all.

The access to F lounges as a OW Emerald is great. Also, for the business class travel options, BA and CX (in OW) are great, together outweighing SQ (in *A). As has been noted, though, the BA option doesn't exist if you're an AA member wanting to redeem or accrue TATL.

OTOH, *A has many more partner options in most of the world, with the notable exceptions of South America and Australia.

That will be solved by JJ, and TACA.

Gap in south pacific coverage
 

Try flying a Oneworld explorer across the pacific and it is impossible to stopover in Tahiti or Easter Island. This is especially irritating as QF does fly to Tahiti but with a code share partner (Air nui Tahiti) but do not make these flights available to the Oneworld alliance.

Well, this is not really an argument (about Easter Island, at least), IMHO. In fact, OW is the ONLY alliance that offers flights to IPC, nobody else flies there AFAIK.

I think OW's key advantage over it's competitors is the strength of it's members lounges. 3 core OW members in particular (BA, QF and CX) all have excellent lounges in both F and J when compared to their *A and ScaryTeam equivalents. Even OW's other big carrier AA offers fairly decent lounges when compared to other US carriers, which is great for those travelling within North America.

I also like the 3 elite tiers that OW offers, although I do wish benefits such as priority baggage was provided alliance wide.

To the people who bang on about consistency being such a strength of OW:

Have you flown MA recently??

Are you pleased with the pay-for-water service concept offered in IB Y? How about the 4-hour 'business class' flights in standard economy seats on IB and BA (no, this is not how all European airlines do it- some actually collapse the middle seat and share the space between the other two)?

Had you flown CX "regional" business class when their "region" used to include Australia? Do you think the so-called lieflat CX C product in its first generation (which AFAIK is still flying pretty long sectors e.g. AMS) is a "great travel option", especially when getting access to an arrivals facility is a lottery?

I hear people banging on about CX lounges. I've not been to a lot, but do they really have such great lounges outside HKG?

This post is not meant to say that oneworld is so bad and that the other alliances are so much better. All of them are all over the place and the simple fact is that membership in any of the three alliances should never be interpreted as a guarantee of good service.

Personally, I feel that one alliance being better than another is all a matter of geographical coverage and market positioning, and therefore strictly individual.

For example, 80% of my travel is within Europe. It would be incredibly foolish to pay for business class for those flights, so I would never make any BA status, and it's always more convenient to connect in the middle as opposed to backtracking and/or suffering a transcon before/after a very short flight, which strikes out flying with 3 out of 4 European ow members. That would leave me with Malev, which is a mediocre airline that's based in a grim airport and only seems to fly to 4 destinations outside of Albania and Moldova.

OTOH, the Skyteam airlines offer fantastic coverage of Europe, with loads of sensible connections, and that's why I mostly fly with them (*A also have good coverage, but I hate FRA and I seem to be very unlucky whenever I fly LX, so I only use them occasionally).

Similarly, it would take a complete idiot to choose ST over OW if they mostly flew around South America.

A *G benefit is extra luggage (20kg where weight concept applies, one extra piece where piece concept applies. In many cases the limit for each piece is also higher although this is not official).

I believe neither ST nor OW offer this benefit, though I'm happy to be corrected.

Skyteam definitely don't offer it (though they do offer the yellow 'priority' tag that helps you identify your bag after everyone has gotten theirs).

I find the extra baggage allowance one of the most useful *G benefits ^ and I'm puzzled that the other alliances don't offer something similar.

The priority tags on *A work (or should I say do not work) in the same way :D , except that they are red.

No, CX flies the 74As which are equipped with new products to AMS.

LHR comes to mind, when compared to other oneworld options in T3. Which carrier has great lounges outside of their respective homebases anyway?

Don't OW sapphire and emerald members get extra luggage allowance as well?

Indeed, OW airlines do not seem to have a 'unified' priority tags. Each seem to have business or first tags... and I don't mind that ;) OW Emeralds usually get F class tags (:D) if the airline has F class (BA, CX, QF, etc.).

I think it's only on the OW airline you have status on: http://www.oneworld.com/ow/ffp/oneworld-status

MA is the red headed step child of OW, and has taken over the reigns from EI. The rest of OW however is a different matter

To be fair to IB, the product in Spain offered by IB's Spanish competitors is pretty similar.

I for one am not the biggest fan of CX regional, however for many services where it is used on 2-5 hour flights, it's far better than the equivalent offered in Europe. It's also equivalent to SQ which is CX's main competitor who is also guilty of subs to non MEL/SYD Australian services.

Outside of HKG, some CX lounges are a little disappointing, but I think your missing the point. The quality of OW lounges at OW hubs is overall better than that offered by OW's competition. I believe this is also the case at outstations and is not limited to CX.

IMHO, I find OW offers the best product, however *A offers the best integration. I can't really talk about ST, as I really have only flown AF and CO which is far too small a representation of the alliance.

It's not just about geographical coverage. I still believe it is about the overall quality of the product on offer.

There are a lot of us who happily pay to fly J even on short haul flights so I don't think you can compare your experience to those who I suspect fly significantly more frequently than yourself.

I have flown LX many times and IMHO they are Europe's most consistent carrier. Never fantastic, but almost always good. Most importantly during irrops, LX in my experience handles these extremely well.