SkyTeam - the nominal alliance
 

<RANT>
I was pleased recently to discover that trans-atlantic AF metal flights could have seats selected on delta.com but a recent event brought me back to earth and pointed out just how nominal the SkyTeam alliance is in places.

I checked in for a DL metal flight across the pond and at the gate I asked if there was an AF rep available to make the seat allocation for an onward intra-european flight. There was not. "They didn't show up today" was the answer I received. I tried calling AF reservations which was not answering the phone despite it being 15 minutes before they were meant to close the US number. The net result was that I left without a boarding card because DL couldn't issue one without a seat allocation in place.

I get to CDG and would have made the connecting flight *if* I hadn't had to wait in line for a boarding card. For this alliance to have such poor integration after this length of time can only be described as PATHETIC! :mad:

</RANT>

That is SOP.

I recently had an MXP-TLV flight. It was an AZ flight but on a Delta itinerary. I wanted to change the flight to the following week and was told by AZ that I had to call DL. DL made the change for me over the telephone, but told me I had to go to the DL ticket office in MXP to get the new paper ticket?

Could I do this in an AZ office in Lugano or Milano, I asked.

Nope.

I went to MXP on the day of the flight and headed to the office that handles all SkyTeam airlines (except AZ). Only one woman was working there, and she handles only AF.

Actually, "working there" is an exaggeration. She had no work to do. We just chatted for about 30 minutes until the DL rep showed up.

Equally pathetic and reminds me of another pet annoyance. You book a flight some EU city with a DL code share > CDG > some US city on DL metal. You strike lucky and your upgrade clears - now you just need to process the PMU. Trouble is that there is no DL ticket desk at the originating city and the 45 min connection in CDG doesn't give you time to process it (it is also supposed to be processed 2 hours out). Sigh......

If you think that the integration is poor at this time, what is going to happen when SkyTeam tries to swallow CO, NW, and KL? This could be a giant case of indigestion that might last for years.

With any luck these additional partners will insist on turning SkyTeam into a real customer focused alliance. I suspect DL doesn't have enough clout with AF at the moment.

...relative to what? Ever seen OneHeathroWorld? :rolleyes:


After bullying it's way into AF's "F" inventory... yeah, DL has seemed to have been lulled into a sense of complacency (vis-a-vis AF) as of late :o

I don't know what you mean by "bullying its way into AF's 'F' inventory." Delta gets seats on other SkyTeam partner airlines the same way you or I do -- by buying them.

Each SkyTeam partner has to buy seats and then can sell them (or give them for miles) at any price it wants.

This is the reason that an El Al-operated, Delta codeshare, Y class ticket TLV-JFK, costs Alitalia FFs 50,000 SkyMiles but Delta FFs have to pay 80,000.

Alitalia simply decided it wanted to charge that many SkyMiles.

Nor do SkyTeam partners always offer the best deal to each other. When I fly TLV-CDG-USA or TLV-MXP-USA, Delta always tries to put me on an El Al flight to Europe -- it costs them less than what AZ or AF are asking.

As a result, if I want to fly anywhere in Europe, Delta will ask 30,000 miles from me if I take an El Al flight (Y class) but 40,000 if I chose a SkyTeam partner.

...an option (by default) that they did not always have. Hence my statement.

Why would AF have not wanted to sell F seats to Delta? Or to Lufthansa, AirTran or even Amtrak?

Simple: quid pro quo
...or in this case, the lack thereof.

Among the reasons DL eventually got access to AF's F inventory-- is because they initially pushed for access to sell Concorde (as well as proposed a hybrid livery on F-BVFC); probably knowing that there was no way on God's green Earth that AF would agree to it.

IMHO, Sky Team is not an "alliance", rather a "marketing agreement".

DL knows darn well what an alliance is and how to run one. In the quality days of the "Alliance of Excellance", Delta / Swis Air / Sabena et all had a real alliance. You could get onward boarding cards from any of the airlines, any of the CTO's any of the gates..... it was truely seemless and mileage posted just as fast as if you were flying on DL. Those were the days.... I still get the feeling PAX are the enamy at DL and I really thougth by now the new man would have fixed this!

alliance
2 : an association to further the common interests of the members;

I'd say SkyTeam meets that definition. The interests of the members, not necessarily the customers.

Are you sure about "buying" the seats? One SkyTeam member's marketing staff who actually made these deals three years ago explained to me that the entire relationship between Delta and them (at that time, to be sure) was based on barter -- no money changed hands at all. Each carrier was "given" a set of Y and F seats on the other's planes to try to sell. They met and simply picked the flights off of lists to get them "even." Any leftovers were available to be sold by the airline that "gave" them; no records even kept on that at all, no report back saying "we sold three of your codeshare seats and here is some money" or anything like that.

Maybe it is different now, but I can't see that Alitalia really gets revenue or occupancy reports on seating from Atlanta to Louisville.

But I also can see special circumstances, like the services to the Middle East, where there is less to barter and some kind of money deal might be needed.

Now one other thing I AM sure about is a similar kind of situation some years ago. Back then, airlines more often accepted each other's flight coupons. At regular meetings, staffs met and exchanged boxes of coupons -- a Northwest person would have a box of coupons on stock "issued by" Delta, and the Delta person had a box of coupons from tickets "issued by" Northwest. The "issued by" line meant that that was the airline that had the money. (This is still what that means, btw.)

NO ONE LOOKED AT EACH COUPON--where it went or how much money that represented. They COUNTED the coupons and cancelled out each other's. Usually they were put into bundles of 100 or 500, like stacks of one dollar bills. Each side might check one or two of the other guy's bundles, just to be sure they weren't full of receipt copies, blanks, etc. Some airlines exchanged by WEIGHT of coupons, and sampled the bundles. There were actually side rules about the number of staples allowed in the weighed bundles. Over the long run, they rarely had surpluses between one another--it all came out in the wash.

You may be right about how the seats are exchanged, I don't know. Of course, the method you are discussing would also constitute buying sets -- albeit with other seats, not money.

In fact, if a MXP-ATL seat on Delta metal doesn't cost AZ any more than an ATL-SAV seat, it would explain a lot. It would explain, for example, why AZ is willing to sell me a TLV-MXP-ATL flight, with the major part being on Delta metal, for several hundred dollars less than DL wants.

I had in mind more the TLV-Europe segments. None of these are codeshare. The only way I can get Delta codeshare tickets all the way is by flying on El Al metal straight to JFK or EWR.

When I buy a Delta TLV-MXP-USA, or TLV-CDG-USA intinerary, Delta tries not to give me SkyTeam partners -- as I noted earlier, I can only believe that this costs them less than El Al. This also would be the reason that Delta wants less miles for a freebie trip on El Al than it does on AZ, AF, or Czech Air.

(If I insist, Delta does shell out for SkyTeam partner tickets and I do insist -- otherwise I do not get the MQM's.)

Just as Lufthansa is willing to sell Delta tickets (should, as has happened in the past, I want to fly to the States via Germany), I believe that AF would always have been happy to sell Delta F tickets, even if they are not codeshare.

History however, tells a different story: access to Air France's Concorde and [for a while] L'espace Premier inventory was off limits to Delta.