LH and TK joining ?!?
 

Today Repubblica (one of the major italian newspapers) has an article about a possible merger going on between Lufthansa and Turkish Airlines http://www.repubblica.it/economia/20...2/?ref=HREC2-1

The article quotes news from Bloomberg and turkish newspaper Haberturk and says LH and TK are interested also in buying LOT .

The merger would create a new major player among global airlinies .

Did anyone hear anything about that ?

There is a thread in the TK forum...

Sorry , was just checking out in the Lh forum , thought Star Alliance would be the best place for this ...

It is:-). But the thread, and some links, were already there....

This would be a very smart move by LH because it could solve the competition problem regarding the 3 Gulf carriers. After all, it would mean that LH would soon be a Middle East carrier itself.

As I said in the M&M subforum already, I really can't think of two less compatible airlines in Europe at the moment. Furthermore, acquisition of shares in such a huge carrier by LH would pretty much render their SCORE efforts useless.

Given the current seismic shifts in the airline industry regarding the Gulf carriers I would not exclude anything. Nevertheless, I preferred to use the conditional.

If it would help with the Tk telephone customer service and email response times, I fully support this.... :)

For a second I thought the OP was saying that these two airlines were joining star.

Merger between LH & TK is as probable as Turkey joining EU = ZERO.

I guess anything is possible, but this seems like a long long long shot

That would be a massive merger that would be difficult to execute well...

TK has a huge network of aircraft routes, and a corporate culture which seems more different than the efficient Germans.

According to what I read in a German newspaper today, it's not really about a merger, but they are considering buying some, say 10% of each other's shares and are thinking about deepening their relationship. We will see what the outcome will be. Maybe (this is my private guess now) it's going to develop into something similar to the EK/QF cooperation, a potential BA/Qatar cooperation within OW, and what AFKL have just started with EY. In this context some deeper cooperation between LH and TK would absolutely make sense.