S7 Will Join Oneworld Alliance
 

This might show up somewhere else on FT but we've talked about it here a lot through the years so...

From Today's issue of The Moscow Times:

S7 carrier will join the Oneworld alliance in 2012, the company said Tuesday, which will make it only the second Russian airline to join a global alliance.

The 10-member airline alliance unanimously elected S7 to join Oneworld after the carrier goes through an 18-month implementation program, the alliance said in a news release.

The company will implement a program to bring its standards in line with those of the alliance, especially with personnel training and IT integration, S7 spokesman Kirill Alyavdin said Tuesday. Over this period, S7 will also sign agreements allowing them to use alliance branding and integrate frequent-flyer programs, he said.

The company has pursued Oneworld membership since June 2007, when it announced the start of membership talks with the alliance. Oneworld's network currently has 750 destinations in almost 150 countries. S7 will expand it by 54 cities and add Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan onto the alliance's map.

Aeroflot has been a member of Oneworld's rival alliance, SkyTeam, since 2006.

S7 has been struggling to restructure 2.3 billion rubles ($74 million) in debt after defaulting on some bonds in February. The company also canceled an order of 15 Dreamliners from Boeing earlier this year.

Despite the airline's difficult financial situation, Oneworld is confident that the Russian carrier will eventually regain stability, alliance spokesman Michael Blunt said, adding that S7's debts are not exceptional in the current economic environment.

"Joining an airline alliance is like getting married -- you see if you like one another, meet the rest of the family and then you finally get engaged," he said in explanation of the almost two years of talks.

Joining the alliance will raise the carrier's international status and give it a chance to develop its international flights network, said Oleg Panteleyev, an independent aviation expert.

In the past several years, S7 has re-branded, changed its trademark, rid its fleet of Russian planes and received an internationally recognized IOSA certification.

Are all the Tu-154s really gone?

Interesting ... I thought I'd heard that they were looking at joining *A...

On S7 yes I think they are all gone.

They initially said *A long ago but Transaero is now aiming at them. OW seems to be all that is left. My apologies to OW aficionados if that sounded mean spirited.

Now, if we can just get SU to get rid of their TU-154s. :D

I think they are rid of them...at least on the routes I fly with them.

The SU web site (not always the best source of such data) suggests that they still have 26 of them.

I'm afraid they are back, even on SVO-LED. Now that fuel is no longer that expensive, I think they decided to use up what's left of the airframes' flying hours rather than subject their brand new Airbii to the wear and tear.

When checking Washington - Perm itinerary on S7 today, I saw, to my surprise, an expanded drop down list of BA-served destinations. I figured S7 might be inching closer to integrating into OneWorld. Routing was fully loaded via convenient IAD-LHR-DME-PEE connections. I can get there on a single ticket (which still can't be done on one Delta/Aeroflot ticket). Too bad the fare quoted was $1,600+. :td: